


Metatron and Messiah

by magnification



Category: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 14:55:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 83,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnification/pseuds/magnification
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cast out from Adai Village, Rossiu gets picked up by the Black Siblings. Life on the surface may be just what the former High Priest's apprentice needs to understand the nature of faith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in 2011 and abandoned it when i kind of fell out with the fandom but i still really like what i have so im posting it here to commemorate my failure. on the off-chance that anybody finds themselves interested in this pairing, let me apologize to you preemptively.

Five days would have begun in peaceful silence, had Rossiu not heard the Father’s voice as soon as he opened his eyes. The first couple of days, he’d thought he’d actually heard it. It bounced off the dark, rocky walls of Adai Village, muffled. But he awoke and remembered he was in a cave. Sunlight crept in as pinkish tendrils to tease his eyelids, alone and outcast. Now, by the fifth day, he knew better. He shut his eyes. Defy the light, he commanded himself, and sleep some more.

Ever since his last allotted night in Adai, resting while the other villagers prepared him for his departure, sleep hadn’t come easily. His legs threw tantrums. Whenever he happened to doze, he dreamt of his mother. They’d banished her to the surface, as well, but even Rossiu’s unconscious knew better than to think he’d meet her again. Every dream was the same. The last image he had of her, blurred with time, would flash: a pale, willowy woman with long, free-flowing chestnut hair, turning her dark eyes to him without a word. The Father awoke him and told him to get ready, it was time. Rossiu didn’t bother tying his hair into its neat, slicked ponytail. His shoulders slumped. He trudged toward the exit. The villagers gave him a rolled-up blanket and a backpack filled with a secondhand knife and fork and a small supply of food and water. The Father placed his hand on Rossiu’s shoulder just before he walked out. Rossiu looked up at him to find his mouth stretched wide and tight, a stifled frown, and a dull glint in the very centers of his dark eyes.

“You’re going to Heaven, Rossiu,” the Father told him.

Rossiu’s first glimpse of the surface was darker than Adai had ever been, even when all the candles blew out. He stood on the sand and gazed upward at an infinite sheet of dark blue, pockmarked with twinkling, tiny lights, millions of them, billions. A silver sphere hovered in an odd corner of the sky like a stranger waiting for another stranger. Rossiu studied them all. He wondered what they were. When he felt himself suddenly exhausted, eyes dragging the rest of his face down, he yawned and hiked until the fatigue made him shudder. He didn’t stop until he reached a looming tower of stone, glimmering in the lights above. He spotted an opening in the rock and headed inside. He fell asleep wondering, still, what this place was, and if his mother had gotten to see it.

He stopped kidding himself and sat up. Heat had already started to surge into the cave. Rossiu backed himself up against the wall so the shadowy rocks could cool his bare shoulderblades. On his first day, he’d removed his thick white poncho, and hadn’t put it back on since; his green bolero came off shortly after. He gazed at the pile of discarded clothes across from him. They sat to the side of his patchy, unfurled blanket, his backpack sitting on top of them. Rossiu hiked the skinny, slipping strap of his black shirt back up onto his shoulder and crawled over to the backpack. His stomach growled. In the morning, he supposed, he should be eating. He unzipped the bag and peered inside.

He’d run out of food. He remembered making a note to himself about it the night before, when he ate the last mushroom in his reserves. The village woman who had packed it for him had told him to conserve his rations, but it wasn’t like there had ever been much to Adai cuisine to tempt him to overeat. Potatoes grew deep in the soil, and the few men who called themselves farmers dug with their bare hands to retrieve them for the twice-daily communal meals; they scaled footstools and stepladders to pluck mushrooms from the walls. A sort of bitter weed grew in the stagnant lake in which the face-god stood. The chefs, all the women of Adai, wrapped them around the heavily salted potatoes, or the mushrooms, whichever they had less of on a given day, and one each was distributed to each villager. That was Adai food; bare staples played up with salt, lots of salt. No meat, ever. Animals were sacred, untouchable. To cook even one of the hundreds of bats that fluttered about the corridors was a sin. Rossiu’s stomach growled. He missed the salt, the bitter blandness of starch that would have kept him satiated nonetheless.

Pushing himself to his feet, Rossiu acquiesced to the fact that he’d have to find food eventually. He’d been in the cave long enough to know there was nothing in it. Outside was no better. He’d only ventured out of the cave once since he’d arrived: the morning after he’d settled there. He stepped out of the mouth of it and peered left, then right, then left again. He ducked back inside in an instant, bored with the vast, quartz emptiness of it all. Nothing to see for miles in every direction but yellow sand and blue sky, broken in the distance by a brown jutting mesa and the entrance to Adai, huge, endless, barren. Rossiu saw nothing he could consider calling food. Today he stood in the entrance of the cave and again glanced in the same pattern around the desert. Nothing had changed.

Rossiu plunked down and sighed. He’d die in Heaven. For the first time since he left his home, he opened his mouth and heard his voice, withered to a dry whisper. “Mother.”

In an instant, a shadow draped over him. Rossiu shut his eyes and fell back at the rumble of the earth below and the wave of dust and air his way. Stunned, he held his arm before his eyes and squinted through the sand at the darkness blocking the cave’s entrance.

A pair of metallic legs, glinting in the sunlight behind them, stood like pillars to block the view. Rossiu froze. Some groaning squeal, the creaking of old iron, sounded out as the legs began to bend. Rossiu saw teeth, sharp ones, metal ones, on the trunk of whatever this thing happened to be. His shoulder rocked to try to make the rest of him follow and crawl away, but he couldn’t move. Glued in place, he watched a hand the size of a man reach inside the cave. The fingers flexed to reach for him.

“Human filth,” came a distorted voice, as tinny as the screeching legs. “What do you think you’re doing up here?”

He didn’t even scream. His eyes widened with the speed of his retracting pupils. The hand closed around his body and squeezed. Rossiu tried to suck in his already gaunt stomach to retreat from the grip, but his lungs could only hold so much before he risked bursting. He gasped. All his carefully-stored oxygen rushed out through his mouth, and he flopped halfway forward. The thing, the creature, the devil, whatever it was, pulled him out of the cave and into the sunlight.

Olive-green, a sneer on its midsection, sunbeams bouncing off the smooth surface of what Rossiu wasn’t sure he could call a head or a stomach, the thing, he decided, was some kind of monster. Naturally. He could take only glimpses of it, as his eyes only opened as slits for shaking seconds. Forfeiting a true look at the whole of the thing, Rossiu shut his eyes and gulped. His air depleted and his head took a nosedive into vertigo. He didn’t want to look at it anymore.

“When will you learn? This is not your place,” the monster growled, fingers tightening around his ribcage.

He didn’t want to look at anything, come to think of it. Not anymore. He caught one last peek at the endless yellow-orange aridity around him, high in the air, higher than he’d ever been. Off in the distance, four black dots bounded in some direction he’d grown too dizzy to identify; now he even fell too exhausted to care what they could even be.

He’d bruise soon. He closed his eyes, ready to fall asleep before any bones broke.

But after a flicker of ephemeral swirls before his eyes and a cacophony of shrill hollers all around him, he came to on the ground, free of the creature’s grip. A grunt forced its way out of his lungs when he bounced against the sand. Gasping for air, he rolled over and tried to shake the remaining faintness from his head. His eyes shot open to the fullest before he realized he’d even opened them.

There were people. Two of them, that he could see immediately, women, but Rossiu was sure he heard more than two voices. He backed himself against the wall of the cliff, and he watched as the two girls darted around the feet of the creature.

One of them, a skinny young girl in far, far too little clothing—Rossiu asked himself if it was underwear she had on, but admonished himself for thinking anybody could even be so indecent—jammed a long stick into the gut-teeth of the monster. A fang shattered, and the girl pulled the stick back and repeated the process, her long violet hair swirling around her like a cape, and then again, and again, and again, until she’d knocked out all but a couple.

The girl with the stick had to keep up with the monster, running around it in a sort-of-circle, as the other girl, a blonde clad in black like her companion—again, showing far too much skin, Rossiu noted—had sent some kind of disc on a long string out to let it wrap around the monster’s legs. It looped and tied them together. The blonde yanked her arm up into the air and the string followed; the toothless creature fell onto its face with a shatter.

Rossiu saw the creature in full now. Its coating certainly was of metal; he couldn’t tell whether it was some kind of shell or if the whole thing had to be some kind of artificial construct. Its face sat in the center of its torso. Legs shot out instead of a neck, arms on the sides in place of ears. It glared at the girls, confused, almost, as it writhed on the ground wrapped in the string. A pathetic, powerful thing, downed by the immodesty of the two of them, probably, and Rossiu couldn’t even move to get closer.

And then from the sky, a third girl, a much more modest brunette in a white scarf, joined the first two on some kind of flying device Rossiu couldn’t describe if he were forced. As the third girl zoomed forward, Rossiu could determine a pair of glasses on her face, glaring in the sun. She circled back and hurled a fist-sized black orb down onto the creature. It exploded on contact. An airstrike.

Rossiu sat and blinked, gape-mouthed. Before he could wonder if he had license to move at all, the blonde girl shot her ball-on-a-string out again and picked the monster back up. It wobbled on its feet. Rossiu ducked when the flying machine swooped back down and slammed sideways into the creature to knock it back against the cliff. He closed his eyes. Dust and pebbles shimmered down onto his head. His neck tickled. He heard the slice of the air as the flying machine zoomed by overhead.

Before he could even open his eyes amid the scattering debris, Rossiu heard a voice, a new one, at a distance. “Get out.” A man. For a second, Rossiu wondered if it was directed at him. He heard the flying machine land several yards away. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peeked out.

A boy, definitely older than Rossiu, but by how much, he couldn’t be sure, scaled the immobilized monster like a ladder. Clad, like the girls, in black from his boots to his shirt, he kept his fierce eyes on the jagged gap between the broken teeth. Rossiu winced away when he saw his eyebrows, these thick dark things pointing downward like he’d never had a millisecond of his life filled with joy, the color of the close-cropped hair all on the sides of his head. But he leaned forward when he saw the boy’s ponytail, this odd blond thing like he’d saved a stripe of long hair at the top of his head just for special, with one loose tendril striking forward from his hairline like a blade. Rossiu remembered when he used to wear his own hair in a tight ponytail. It did the same thing. The Father would have probably told the boy to keep trying to slick it back.  _It’s not obeying_.

“Get out,” the boy snarled again. He had no idea Rossiu even watched him. “Get out and quit being a pussy!”

Rossiu watched him grab onto the edge of a shattered tooth and pull himself the last half foot up. He reached inside the mouth and pulled.

Another person emerged from the mouth, held by the boy’s fist. It fell forward and sent the boy back down to the ground as well, and crumpled on top of him. The creature’s foot blocked Rossiu’s view. He craned his neck to try to get a better look.

Whatever the boy with the ponytail had drawn from the maw was not human. Rossiu’s brows knitted. The…Person, he supposed, was roughly the size of the boy, but covered in thick, dark, matted hair. Three-fingered hands pushed it up to its feet, and the boy swiped his leg to trip it back to the ground. It wiped its ruddy face, bald in the front, apelike. Rossiu covered his mouth. Even in Adai, they wouldn’t have called this type of animal sacred.

The boy with the ponytail had gotten to his feet now, and he shoved his boot in the ape-creature’s face. With a distinct trill to his r’s, he snarled something to it, asked it where something was, possibly someone. Rossiu couldn’t make it out. The hairy thing shook its head, frantic and trembling, and waving its hands to gesture that it didn’t know. The boy rubbed his boot farther into its face. It still didn’t know.

The boy removed his boot from the hairy thing’s face and whistled to signal the blonde girl. Nigh-psychic, she lifted her string device to the air and wound it around the creature, jerked it back, whipped her arm in the air, and sent the creature flying off into the horizon. Somewhere against the sandy expanse, it shrank to a dot, and then into nothing. Gone. Over. Rossiu fell back against the face of the cliff and closed his eyes. Shoulders shrugged and still in his hands, he decided to allow himself the privilege of a second to breathe before thanking the three girls and the boy. He could spoil himself with life.

Rossiu realized then that he had regained his breath, at last. He clutched his chest and remembered, strangely, that he’d left his poncho, even his bolero, inside the cave. Left in only his thin black sleeveless top, these people could look over at him at any moment and see his shoulders, his collarbones, his arms, pale and lewd. What a traitor to his home village he was! Adai focused so much effort on keeping things pristine and unknowable, and he stood here exposing nearly as much skin as these girls. Custom kept the ponchos on; custom kept interactions terse but chaste; custom elevated modesty to the holiest of virtues. Rossiu held his shoulders. He had to play the envoy.

But a shadow zipped up before him and forced his eyes open. Rossiu saw the drape of violet hair before the expanse of skin.

“Bro, he’s alright!” the girl squealed.

“Y-you shouldn’t jump to conclusions like that, Kiyal…” Behind her, the girl who had piloted the flying machine stepped forward. She seemed to shrink into herself, stuttering. “…H-he could still be hurt, internally.”

The blonde girl followed close behind and pushed past when she reached Rossiu. She glanced at the brunette and nodded in not-quite-total-but-good-enough agreement. She clutched her hands before her ample chest, thankfully shielding it from view a bit, and offered him a ready, sympathetic, blue-eyed gaze. “How are you feeling, darling?”

And then, “Ahh, lemme take a look.”

A pair of rough, dirt-covered hands slipped into the gap between the blonde and the brunette and parted them like jungle brush. The boy stepped between them. He stared down at Rossiu, his ferocious eyebrows unchanged from before, always pointing downward. Silent, he let his steel-blue eyes study Rossiu from the top down and back up again. Rossiu shivered.

But he stared back. Somehow he’d managed to get his eyes to peer right up into the boy’s, and after a moment, he realized they were staring each other down. Rossiu of course hadn’t offered a challenge. It didn’t seem the boy had either. Rather, Rossiu gazed at the sneer across his lips, the teeth shining out behind them. His eyes had a bit of a sunken darkness to them, but Rossiu couldn’t immediately attribute it to sleep deprivation or genetics. The faintest breeze blew the stray blonde hair at the boy’s hairline. It fell right back into place, tickling his cheek. Cavern winds had always done the same to Rossiu back in Adai.

Study. That was all it was.

The boy knelt down before Rossiu, eyes never as much as jittering away from the dead lock they shared on one another. Softly, as if desperate to avoid furthering some kind of potential injury, he swept his fingertips across Rossiu’s knuckles. His look softened, melted, and evaporated, like butter into boiling water.

“You okay, kid?”

He hadn’t noticed Rossiu’s shoulders. “I’m fine.”


	2. 2

They called themselves the Black Siblings. Three sisters and their older brother, they rode across the desert and protected any sign of life they found with whatever they could. Kiyoh, the blonde and the oldest of the girls, fancied a yo-yo, as Rossiu learned it was called; bespectacled Kinon, the middle child, stuck to a high-tech, largely reverse-engineered aerial arsenal; Kiyal, the youngest, struck like a bloodthirsty acrobat with a stick longer than she was tall. Kittan stuck to an endless stockpile of wrath, to his fists. The four shared a battery of black spheres that Kinon called flammable water. “Makes ‘em explode,” Kiyal said. They’d seen the metal thing on Kinon’s radar when they awoke. With a whistle, Kittan summoned three woolly, backwards-looking creatures called nakibashiri for he, Kiyoh, and Kiyal to ride, while Kinon piloted her jet-scooter, hitching the shell of the metal creature to it and dragging it aloft behind them. Crouching low in front of her, Rossiu rode with Kiyoh. She kept her hand on his side to hold him, like a soft restraint, in place. For now, they set up camp in a ravine on the opposite side of the valley. They’d stay another day or two. Outside the entrance, told the nakibashiri, loyal as they apparently were, to stay put. They brought Rossiu inside and sat him on a pile of quilts, ridden with holes. He gazed at each of them, the four vicious nomads caring for him. What did they do, he’d asked.

They hunted beastmen.

Kiyoh leaned in with a rag to rub a salve onto the scrape on Rossiu’s temple. He winced at the sting. He’d emerged reasonably well, somehow; a couple of scrapes from where he’d hit the ground, and a lavender bruise welling up on his shoulder, but aside from that, he’d need only some food, water, and rest. Kiyal had gone out in search of food. He saw Kiyoh discard the rag and reach for a roll of bandages when he peered past her. Watching Kinon lower the metal silhouette into the far, shadowed end of the ravine, Kittan leaned against the rock wall directly across from Rossiu and Kiyoh.

 “Ms. Kiyoh,” he began, lips twitching to tame the syllables. “Wh-what is a beastman?”

“You poor little thing. You really haven’t been up here very long, have you?” Kiyoh asked, wrapping a bandage around his right shoulder.

He shook his head. He would offer a specific answer only if asked.

“Furry fuckers. You saw one,” Kittan barked. Rossiu peered around Kiyoh at him; he kept his eyes on the descending metal creature. He pointed at it, grinning. “I pulled him outta there. We took care of him.”

Rossiu followed the arrow of Kittan’s fingertip. The thing, the creature, whatever it may have been, twirled on the length of rope by which it was held. One last glare of sunlight flashed across its surface before it fell into the shadows. Its olive drab surface darkened, Rossiu fixed on it. It turned another degree in its midair suspension, a chip-toothed poltergeist with dead eyes set on Rossiu, yards and yards away. It was helpless. A chill nipped at the back of Rossiu’s neck.

It was a face-god.

The Black Siblings had rendered it immobile, but it was a face-god. It had descended on him so suddenly he hadn’t realized. Such a fool! All the moisture in Rossiu’s mouth retreated. After a flash of the face-god,  _the_ Face-God, sitting tight-lipped and stony in the stagnant pond back at home, he knew. He’d gone up to Heaven and a face-god attacked him. He wondered why it had waited five days before it occurred to him why it would do so in the first place. He figured it had needed the time to decide his fate.

Purgatory. He was in purgatory. He hadn’t earned the surface’s pleasures.

But what could he have possibly done? Or not done? He felt the faint weight of eyes on him as his own widened.  _When will you learn?_ Maybe he should have kept covered? Or walked, instead of hidden? He clutched his chest. He must have sinned. Immensely. These people, Kittan and his sisters, had halted divine retribution itself. What were they, angels? His heart whirred like pinwheel. They had killed a face-god.

No.

Rossiu squinted at it. Before he’d known what it was, he hadn’t felt any holy light, any brimstone heat. Nothing exuded from that face-god like it had from the one underground. The one in Adai had a presence, this gray, solid aura he knew hadn’t been just from candlelight against rocks. He could bathe in it whenever he and the Father, side by side, gazed upon it. He’d almost been able to touch it. But when this one grabbed him, he gave up, terror-stricken. His fingernails scraped the skin above his collarbones.

“What did you do to it?” he shivered.

Kittan shrugged. “Disabled it, at least. We’ll take it apart and use it however we can.”

“Don’t worry,” Kiyoh smiled. She backed away from Rossiu, apparently finished with patching him up. “It can’t hurt you. It’s useless without a pilot.”

Rossiu said nothing. He knew they had to mean the furry humanoid Kittan had yanked from its mouth. A pilot, though—it made no sense. He studied every word from the siblings’ mouths like he’d transcribed them onto parchment in his head.

They would take the face-god apart to recycle the corpse of the almighty. Cannibal angels.

But the face-god, which had indeed come to hurt Rossiu, was useless without a pilot, a half-ape. He wondered if the beastman had been some kind of demon infecting the face-god; the Black Siblings, then, had come to purify the holy. Exorcists of the highest sphere.

Kinon finally eased the face-god onto the ground. A slow creaking of its limbs falling limp onto one another echoed through the ravine. It lay crumpled and vandalized, corporeal. It had never had an aura. Rossiu wondered if it had ever held a seat in the Adai pantheon.

“What is it?” he asked. He looked into the first pair of eyes he could focus on, after the spinning in his head had subsided, and a pair of twitching, thick eyebrows greeted him. Kittan had started to smirk, and his teeth glinted in the slit between his lips. It dropped, though, after a moment of unbroken stillness. Out of the corner of his eye, Rossiu saw Kiyoh step out of the way so Kittan could stroll past.

He crouched in front of Rossiu, brow cocked. “You don’t even know what a gunmen is?”

Kittan’s eyes had a different sort of glow in them here in the shadows. Even this close, Rossiu couldn’t quite figure it out. He shook his head.

“How long have you been up here?” Kittan asked.

“Five days.”

“Five days?” his head bobbed back. “You been up here five days and you haven’t seen any gunmen? Holy shit, Rossiu!”

He could ignore such profanity if he straightened his back and sat up properly. He cleared his throat. “Please tell me what they are.”

Kittan stood up and took Rossiu by the hand to pull him up with him. He yanked him into position beside him. They looked at the motionless gunmen, the face-god.

“It’s a…Gunmen, y’know, like I said,” he began, waving his hand in its direction. “They’re robots, mecha. Weapons. The beastmen pilot ‘em, those furry guys—they’re, like, half-human and half-animal, I think, least that’s what most of ‘em look like—they ride around in ‘em. I dunno where they come from, nobody does. Some of ‘em say some shit about a Helix King, whoever the hell that is.”

“We’re not supposed to be up here on the surface,” Kiyoh added. She ambled over to Kittan’s side and peered out with him. “Humans. We’re supposed to stay underground, in our villages. But sometimes that isn’t even good enough for them.”

Kittan’s hand hadn’t let go of Rossiu’s, and his grip tightened for a flash of a second around it. “Only reason we’re up here is ‘cause this one beastman, a long time ago, decided to come into Bachika Village, where we’re from, and he just…” he swept the air back and forth with his free hand as if batting at invisible flies. He scowled. “Destroyed it. Us, we’re the only ones who made it out.”

“That we know of,” Kiyoh murmured. She let out a quiet sigh, her chest rising and falling quickly, and lifted her voice to continue. In the distance, Kinon had taken some tool to the surface of the gunmen and began prying the metal coating away from a silver mesh layer on the right arm. “We’ve seen the same thing plenty of times. I don’t know why they think they still have to kill us when we’re living underground like they want us to. People end up on the surface because the beastmen destroyed their homes, and then they punish them for it.”

Kittan grunted. “We don’t stand for that kinda bullshit. We fight back. Might as well. It’s not like we got anywhere we can go home to. If we can fight ‘em off before they hurt anybody else, or destroy any more villages, we’re gonna.”

Kittan’s grip on Rossiu’s hand had tightened to the point that the feeling in Rossiu’s fingertips began to drain. He looked up at him. Maybe his mouth had tightened, or one more angry wrinkle had etched itself across the bridge of Kittan’s nose; Rossiu couldn’t tell. He squeezed and frowned, and stared off with his granite eyes settled far beyond the gunmen, beyond the splinter of light at the other end of the ravine. Rossiu hung his head. With the minimal motions he could manage, he held Kittan’s hand back, squeezed it as best he could. He didn’t see Kittan turn to look down at him, but he felt the grip ease.

He peeked up at him. Kittan’s frown faded in rhythm with a sigh to a half-smile.

Kiyal’s voice echoed from the entrance of the ravine behind them. She’d found food. The three of them turned to look at her, and Kittan and Kiyoh cheered, told her thanks, and bounded up to meet her. Rossiu followed behind until his hand slipped from Kittan’s hold. The three siblings chattered a few feet ahead of him. Kiyal held up something limp and round. Kiyoh took it from her and faded into a shadow against the light from outside.

While Kiyoh cooked the mystery food at the very front of the cavern, and Kiyal skipped down the length of it to join Kinon in dismantling the gunmen, Kittan slipped off into the darkness, digging into a pile of something or another that Rossiu couldn’t make out. Nobody had told him to make himself at home. He stood at the lighter end of the chasm, alone.

The gunmen, the face-god, was just a machine, used by hybrids to kill humans for leaving their underground villages. Nothing more. And four individuals, as old as or only slightly older than Rossiu, had to stop them. He wondered if the Father knew.

He stood around long enough for Kiyoh to take notice and tell him, finally, that he could sit wherever he liked. He thanked her and stumbled to the wall against which Kittan had earlier stood, never looking away from the younger two girls taking apart the gunmen. He fell into a trance. Everything he could remember from as many of the Father’s sermons scrawled and replayed and hung before his eyes. Something, somewhere, had to explain the surface. It just couldn’t possibly be Heaven, nor could it be purgatory. Yet if it happened to be Hell, how were these four able to take down an agent of evil? That was hope, right? He couldn’t let it just be a place. The surface was more than that.

Kiyoh called out to her siblings and Rossiu that the food was ready. He hadn’t noticed her approaching him until she crouched beside him with a handful of plates, freckled with scratches and chips. She smiled and placed one in his hands, along with a fork of a quality not much higher than the plates. “Come by the fire. I’ll give you a little extra, okay, honey? You need to get better.”

“Thank you, Ms. Kiyoh,” he replied.

She let out an airy chuckle and stood to hand the rest to her sisters and brother. Rossiu joined the four of them in arranging themselves in a wide circle around the fire pit. Kiyoh returned to him before any of the rest of them; with a long fork that appeared to have been carved from stone, she placed a large charred chunk of  _something_ on his plate. He cocked his head at it. Certainly wasn’t anything he’d had back in Adai. He poked at it while she distributed the rest of the food.

“M-Ms. Kiyoh, might I ask what this is?” he bit his lip and jammed his fork into the side of his food. “Not that I’m scrutinizing, I just…Had some food from my village with me over the past few days, so I haven’t gotten to try any food here on the surface. I’m. I’m curious.”

He almost regretted asking until Kiyoh smiled again. He wondered how much he could ask her before she’d quit doing it; there had to be a limit, right? For now, he smiled back. “It’s flying tanuki. It’s a little gamey, but it’ll hold you over.”

Flying tanuki. He supposed he’d seen one fluttering in front of the cave once or twice, furry little round creatures gliding on brown wings.

Meat. He had to eat  _meat_.

He stammered, maybe trying to sound out a protest of some type, but it never came out all the way. Rossiu chipped a bit of it off and onto his fork, only to stare at it.

“…Are you okay, Rossiu?” Kiyoh asked.

“Um,” he pursed his lips. “I’m. Fine. Thank you very much. It’s just…We don’t eat meat in my village. I’ve…Never had it.”

Kiyal didn’t even bother swallowing before letting out a flat, incredulous “Whaaaaaaat.” Beside her, Kinon shrank away, nibbling her food and looking off at some point she’d invented to avoid the entire conversation. On the other side of the circle, Kittan swallowed and pointed his fork in Rossiu’s direction.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re gonna have to tell me about this village of yours. You don’t eat meat there, _apparently_  it’s not destroyed, if you don’t know about gunmen, you’ve got these big…Fuckin’ pants on,” he speared the tanuki. “And you’re up here on the surface. Tell me about it.”

Rossiu sat up straight. He would have asked what exactly was wrong with his pants, but, for the sake of decorum—he was a guest, after all—he let it slide. He did, however, tighten his lips as he spoke. “Adai Village is not destroyed. You’re right about that. We don’t eat meat because we don’t have the resources for livestock. We only eat plants and mushrooms, it’s all we can grow. We have animals there, bats and insects, mostly, but it’s a sin to eat them.”

Three of the Black Siblings ate quietly and politely as he spoke. Kiyal, the deaf ears on which his words fell, wolfed the rest of her meal down like she’d been on the verge of forgetting the taste of food. Rossiu trudged on.

“We wear these pants,” he intoned, “to cover up. Our people are modest. Revealing your skin is a sin.”

Kittan’s eyes flicked over to Kiyoh, who had started staring down at the plunging neckline of her bodysuit. He frowned and turned back to Rossiu. “Then what’re your shoulders doing…Hangin’ out? Your arms and all.”

And he shrank. The fork slipped from his fingers and clinked against the plate. Heat rushed into his cheeks. “I-I had a poncho. And a bolero, but it was very hot here on the surface, so I took them off. They’re back in the cave. I wouldn’t have taken them off, but I didn’t think anybody would see me.”

“What a weird place,” Kiyal said. She placed her empty plate to her side and gazed at her brother, as if searching for accord. “What are you doing up here, then?”

Rossiu dropped his head to face the dark wedge of floor between his crossed legs. He wouldn’t say anything of the face-god yet. The right time would come when it would, or when the right information did; that was how fate worked. He paused to peruse his lexicon and choose the proper words. “I was expelled.”

Kiyoh gasped. “Oh, what in the world for? Who would send you up here?”

He lifted his hand to his face. When he spoke, his fingers traced the edges of his lips. “Adai Village can only support fifty people. We only have so much food, and we can’t really expand.

“A woman had a baby. It put us at fifty-one residents, so we held the ceremony. We always wait until after a woman has had her baby to do it, because there’s always the chance it may die before it’s even born. It’s happened before. The Father called us all to the commons and read from the scriptures, then everyone drew a stick from the jar. Mine had the mark, so I was expelled. It’s only fair.”

They stopped eating.

“The Father says the surface is Heaven. My mother was sent here, too, when I was very young.” Rossiu tapped the side of the fork against the slab of tanuki. He thought he had something else to add, but it never came.

“That’s pretty messed up, Rossiu,” Kittan said.

Rossiu shot his head up to look at him, a desire to argue bubbling intrinsic in his throat, but he kept quiet. Kittan didn’t even wear that harsh scowl he’d had almost anytime his voice sounded in such a manner. Brows relaxed, mouth straight, his head shook slowly, almost imperceptibly.

“I mean,” Kittan started, shrugging. “I dunno what this religion of yours is, but I can tell you right now the surface ain’t any Heaven.” He scratched the back of his neck. “It’s not even Hell, really. It’s a piece of shit we gotta make the best of, I guess. I dunno. That’s just messed up that your dad would send you up here. You’re such a little guy. Look at you.”

Rossiu could think of nothing to say but, “He’s not  _my_ father. He’s  _the_ Father. Our High Priest. He’s in charge of the village.”

“Still messed up,” he shook his head and chipped off another piece of tanuki. “Still messed up. But hey, you lived.”

True. His chin resting almost between his collarbones, Rossiu peeked around at the Black Siblings. Kiyoh hadn’t yet resumed eating. She kept her hand over her mouth. Rossiu sighed, closed his eyes, and took a bite of the tanuki.

He ate as much of it as he could, but wound up with a mild stomach ache that drove Kiyoh to insist he spend the rest of the day in bed. She brought him a little bowl of pink-red berries later in the evening. They didn’t help his nausea, but they at least tasted nice. Sweet. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been acquainted with sweet. Kiyoh told him she’d try to get some more for him when she could.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing a sleeping space with my brother tonight,” she said. She patted the mass of quilts he’d rested on since the morning. “This is his bed, actually.”

Rossiu’s face stiffened.

“He says it’s fine,” she added quickly. “He’s not bad to share a space with, I don’t think. I’ve never heard him snore or anything, and he’s almost impossible to wake up. He might move around a little, though. We just…You know, only have so many supplies…”

“I-it’s fine, Ms. Kiyoh.” He knew of lacking. “It’s fine.”

After dinner, the siblings took a torch each and marched over to the dissembled gunmen. Rossiu, sure he was tired but unsure why, as he’d been in bed for hours, rolled onto his back and watched the stripe of sky between the rocks above darken to bluish near-black. The little sparkling lights dotted the field of the heavens again. That big object, the silver orb, must have been hiding behind the cliff, but he could see its glow creeping into the night sky. Had the Father ever seen this? Did he—and not unfoundedly, Rossiu admitted—mistake it for Heaven? Somehow he felt himself hard-pressed to disagree with Kittan on anything but that the surface was a piece of shit. Nothing with a glittering, brilliant sky like this could be a piece of shit. He let his eyes close. He was alive. He hadn’t died. He hadn’t died. The hushed chitchat of the Black Siblings and the distant crackling of the torch flames sent him dozing.

He woke up not long after, in the middle of a dream. He saw his mother again, but heard Kittan’s voice while she faded away. At some point he’d rolled onto his side, and it wasn’t until he turned back, following the direction of his voice, that he realized Kittan had placed his hand on his shoulder.

“Ahh, damn, you were asleep. I didn’t mean to wake you up, sorry, I was just checking,” Kittan attempted to whisper. He couldn’t quite pull it off; his voice had too harsh a rasp, too sharp an edge to soften enough. Sitting on the ground beside him, Kittan had taken his ponytail out; his hair hung to his chin, straight and shapeless, but not, Rossiu thought, altogether wrong-looking. He wore only his underwear. Rossiu rubbed his eyes longer than he likely had to.

A groan seeped out as Rossiu stretched. “It’s okay.”

“Look, uh-” Kittan turned around, and Rossiu heard a shifting of cloth. “I, um. I know I’m not always—I dunno, I say shit I don’t mean sometimes. It just comes out, I guess. So, uh. But.” He turned back. A bundle of something black flopped into his lap, and he held it out toward Rossiu. “This is for you.”

Rossiu sat up, rubbing his eyes again. Kittan showed too much skin to avoid. He took the folded bundle from him. Cloth. It unfurled when he held it up, but in the darkness, he still couldn’t quite tell what it was.

“Hope you’re okay with wearing some hand-me-downs. It’s Kiyal’s old pants, from back when she used to…Heh, cover up. Unlike me right now, by the way, sorry.”

Rossiu chuckled. It was silent, but he chuckled.

Kittan did the same. “I trimmed ‘em a little, since she’s taller than you, but these are nice and light. They’ll feel better when it’s hot. We can find you something that fits better the next time we get to a village that can get us clothes.” He turned around and placed another something in Rossiu’s lap. “Had a pair of my old boots lying around, too, ‘cause Kiyal wants ‘em, for some reason. Always wants all my old shit. Like she doesn’t even realize she’s a girl. I hope they fit you, your feet are pretty tiny. I’m, like…Fuckin’…” He waved his hands like a pair of unfolding wings, expanding from a central point, and rested them on the ground. “…Next to you. I dunno. Size of a house.”

Again, Rossiu responded with a voiceless giggle, and ran his fingers down the side of a boot. He hadn’t received a new outfit in months, and it was always the same ensemble in a new size. Growing boy.

“Thank you,” he said.

Kittan patted him perhaps a bit too hard on the back. “You can wear ‘em tomorrow, I guess. We gotta get some sleep, right?”

Rossiu nodded. He crawled to the end of the quilt pile and put his new clothes atop a nearby rock. Together, he and Kittan fumbled through the darkness to find a decent enough alignment under and between the quilts. They settled on their sides, back-to-back, panting, bodies scrunched up and touching. They shared the pillow off of which both their heads were in danger of slipping. Rossiu heard Kittan grunt to himself before shifting his head back onto it.

Both of them had to wait for their hearts to settle before even trying to try sleeping.

Itching at the shift of Kittan’s hair against his own, Rossiu tried to focus on that instead of their shoulderblades touching, or his feet knocking against Kittan’s thighs. His eyes wouldn’t close. It was awfully hot.

“Kittan,” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

“Why did you give me those clothes? I mean, I appreciate it, honestly, I j—”

“—‘Cause, you’re with us now.”

Rossiu flipped over in his attempt to peer back at him, and undid all the work he’d done getting comfortable.

Kittan did the same and just grinned, wild and smug. Rossiu obeyed.


	3. 3

Rossiu woke up with more Kittan on top of him than blanket. In the night, he’d draped an arm and a leg over Rossiu’s body and pushed his head off the pillow; now only the quilt separated him from the rocky ground. Kiyoh hadn’t lied when she said he might move, just made a gross understatement. Forgivable. He just didn’t know what to do.

Desperate to continue obtruding as little as possible, Rossiu lay still. He decided he wouldn’t move until Kittan woke up. He closed his eyes and timed his breathing with Kittan’s quiet breaths behind him. They puffed out hot against his hair.

He thought. In bed he always had plenty of time to think. One thought bled into another like when the sky grew dark, imperceptible until he realized he couldn’t see. His stomach ache had gone away; would he have to eat more meat or would Kiyoh find some more of those berries for him? Would she keep him in bed again? What would the Black Siblings do all day? If he was with them now, like Kittan had said, wearing the oil-black garments he’d given him the night before, was he supposed to help them? Rossiu couldn’t do anything they did. He never fought. Fighting was forbidden. What could he do, out here in the brightness and the heat, away from his people and his Father and his worship, endless tasks of worship and prayer and meditation studying the problems of the villagers around them to offer a prescription of penance and reverence tailor-made for each malady and sin? Kittan stirred behind him, and he forgot he’d thought about anything at all.

Yawning, Kittan stretched and rolled onto his side in one motion. Rossiu scooted a few inches away from him. Whether the move contributed or not, it didn’t seem Kittan noticed he’d even touched him at all. He combed his fingers through his hair.

Rossiu pretended to wake up when Kittan looked over at him. He sat up after him. Rossiu had nothing if not a good view of Kittan’s back, all suntanned and polka-dotted with half-healed scars. His back had seen more work than Rossiu ever had. “Good morning, Mr. Kittan,” he said.

“Mister?” he sneered. “I ain’t mister, you don’t gotta- I’m just Kittan, Rossiu.”

He looked down. A fine start to the day.

“Let’s get up. If the girls aren’t up yet, we’ll go find something to eat.” Kittan stood and lifted his arms into the air to stretch again. Rossiu watched him from below; so far down below. Every time, it seemed, that he thought Kittan was a certain height, he went and made himself taller.

Rossiu followed him up and reached for the pair of Kiyal’s old pants and Kittan’s old boots. Still combing his limp blond hair with his hand, Kittan had already started lumbering over to a sharp rock jutting out from the wall like a shelf. While he pulled his folded clothing from it, Rossiu glanced from side to side. Focus on anything but him, he told himself, he needs his privacy, look at him. No. Don’t. Privacy.

Kiyoh and Kinon were still asleep against the opposite wall a few feet down from one another, on piles of quilts not unlike the one he and Kittan had shared. He heard Kiyal muttering something to herself, but refused to follow the sound. He would have had to intrude on Kittan as he changed. Thankfully, the older two girls wrapped themselves so tightly in their blankets, he didn’t have to see anything but an ankle and a shoulder while he searched for somewhere to change; an unfruitful mission.

“Kittan,” he near-whispered, staring down with intent at the clothing in his arms.

“Yeah?” he replied.

“Where can I…Where can I change…?”

“Right there, it’s—” Kittan sputtered for a second when he wrestled his shirt on. “—It’s fine. Go behind one of the big rocks, if you wanna. None of us are gonna care.”

More to keep from risking looking at the half-clothed Kittan than anything else, Rossiu zipped behind the nearest large boulder. Of course they wouldn’t care. Rossiu could determine that much on his own. He closed his eyes when he removed his pants and replaced them with his new black ones.

They fit, almost, but he still trembled. It didn’t feel right, letting his white pants from home drop to the dusty ground around his twig-thin ankles and then kicking them out of the way. The dirt that covered them wouldn’t come off easily. He looked down and appraised himself, all black everywhere. Kittan had cut the pants a bit too short, and not particularly evenly, but Rossiu wouldn’t complain. When he stepped into the boots, which were maybe a toe’s length too large, they at least covered up the jagged hemlines. He twisted himself around to examine his back and his front. He’d never felt skinnier. The waistline was just an inch too many in diameter. He picked up his old pants from the ground, removed the white sash, and tied it around his waist. He breathed out.

Kittan had finished changing when he peeked over the boulder. Folding his old pants, he stepped out and watched Kittan head into the darker end of the ravine, where he crouched by a pile of old metal and started to dig. There seemed to be a place for everything here, Rossiu thought, placing the pants at the foot of the pile of quilts; how they would manage to move it all when it came time to leave, he didn’t know. He’d never quite understood how disorganized people functioned.

Carrying two long pieces of metal and a cylinder of some type hoisted by a strap onto his shoulder, Kittan stepped quietly past Kiyal and headed for Rossiu. When he entered whispering distance, he gave Rossiu a grin and a thumbs-up. “Lookin’ good.”

Rossiu forced out a chuckle. His hands clenched the thin fabric on his sides. “Th-thank you. Y-you, too.”

Though he silently admonished himself for going beyond the pleasantries, Rossiu made out a faint glimmer of satisfaction in Kittan’s eyes. Don’t I know it and let’s move along, it said. Kittan held out the smaller of the two curved metal bars, which Rossiu now noticed had a thin string tied to either end of it. “S’do this thing.”

“What is this?” Rossiu took the object from him. Whatever it was, he watched it more than Kittan as he followed him outside.

“Bow,” he answered. Rossiu looked up when he pulled on the strap of the cylinder; inside, a number of long, skinny poles with feathers at the end rattled about. “And these are arrows. I didn’t think you ever woulda used these.”

“What are they for?”

“Hunting. You take an arrow and put it up against the bow, and you aim it at the animal or whatever you’re trying to get. And then you pull back on the string like this,” he pantomimed the motion with his own bow. “And it shoots out. If you do it right, y’know, you get it. The animal. Shit, I’m hungry.”

Kittan went on. “Y’know, now’s the best time of day to go hunting. This, or when the sun’s just going down. You know what the sun is, right? That’s what they call the big yellow thing in the sky. Heard it from some guys in another village once. They knew all kinds of stuff, like the gray thing at night is the moon, and the little sparkly things are stars. They said the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. You can tell the time of day by it. I dunno how they knew all that shit. Fuckin’ crazy. Here, hold this.”

Right when they reached the bright entrance of the ravine, they stopped. Kittan forced the bow into Rossiu’s hands. He fumbled with it a second. Kittan slicked his hair back, gathered it at the back of his head, and bound it into a ponytail with a tie he’d wrapped around his wrist. The stray blade of hair at his temple fell loose in front of his face.

Kittan looked down at Rossiu with a crooked smirk. “What’s that look for?”

He felt his face move, but from where, he wasn’t sure. Good question. “Wh-what look?”

“Smilin’.”

He heard one of the nakibashiri snorting a greeting when he looked down at his feet. The pale dawn light hit his boots in grainy bubbles. “U-um. Heh. It’s just—when I lived in Adai, I always had to keep my hair up like that, kind of. And I had a hair that did the same thing yours does—you can actually still sort of see it, I think.”

He caught the strand by his temple in two fingers angled like scissors. Rossiu remembered when he was little, very little, his mother had called it a cowlick. He heard her voice quite clearly when he thought about it, saying the word. She’d always had a very clear voice, a bit on the deeper side, authoritative. The Father asked her to testify with some regularity, he thought because of it. She said his cowlick would probably only ever obey if it grew long enough, long as the rest of his hair. He wanted it as long as it could be.

Kittan angled his head and looked at it, hanging in between Rossiu’s fingers. He snickered and tapped his shoulder to keep him walking behind him. They followed the left side of the wall, past the nakibashiri. “Fuckin’ twins, how do you like that. You  _had_  to keep it tied back?”

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the path before him. “I wasn’t really…Supposed to have it this long.”

“Another sin?”

“No. For boys to have it, it’s just frowned on, really. We’re supposed to keep it out of the way. I got away with it if I tied it back. I like it better long.”

“Doesn’t look bad on you.”

How many compliments would Kittan force him to take? Rossiu bit his lip and thanked him. He walked right into Kittan’s outstretched hand.

“We’re here,” Kittan said.

 At last, Rossiu looked up. They’d rounded the corner of the cliff, and on the other side, he could see a vast pool of water, framed with tall, yellowish brush. A handful of trees sat on the opposite bank of the watering hole, their leaves sagging in the rising heat. A chorus of buzzing insects swelled and then faded just as quickly.

Kittan hadn’t bothered moving his hand away, even though Rossiu had backed off by a couple of inches. He whispered. “Y’know, I didn’t bring you out here just to hunt. I gotta train you.”

“Train me?” Rossiu asked. When he shrugged, he found himself holding up the bow. “With this?”

“With anything. I talked to my sisters about it. I’m gonna show you how to use all kinds of shit, see what you like best. I figured I’d start with the bow and arrow, just ‘cause it’s, uh. Useful.” His eyes scanned from one end of the watering hole to the other. “Convenient, it’s convenient. Here.”

He removed two arrows from the case and handed one to Rossiu. Positioning his own into place on the bow, he pulled the arrow and the string back. “Watch me and try it.”

Rossiu could not for the life of him figure out how Kittan kept the arrow so steady. His own shook against the bow, and he couldn’t extend his arm far back enough to get the string as tight as Kittan had his own. But he kept going, squinting to try to see whatever it was Kittan appeared to be looking at, intently, eyes alight and brows arched. Kittan released the arrow.

He congratulated himself with that wild grin of his once the airy zip gave way to a hushed thump. “Yeah! It’s down, Rossiu, just aim and—and—no.”

Apparently Rossiu had done something fundamentally wrong with the entire positioning of his body. Kittan dropped his bow to the ground and took to grabbing Rossiu with one hand by the waist and the other by the elbow.

His whole body tightened up. Rossiu’s eyes had widened, and the flush in his cheeks surged to a crimson flare when Kittan slid his hand down his side and onto his thigh. He straightened his leg. He positioned his ankle a ways back. He pushed his one hand on the bow forward and pulled the other arm back further than he ever thought it could have gone, bringing the string and the arrow with it. He touched his chest. His other hand landed back on the curve of Rossiu’s hip, and he leaned in right close to his face to mutter, voice low and husky, “That feel better?”

It felt  _something_. Rossiu’s insides wriggled like a family of worms into a knot and pulled tight.

“You gotta be in the right position,” Kittan said, mercifully leaving Rossiu’s body and standing beside him. “Else it won’t go. The arrow. Now let it go, you got it.”

He’d started biting the insides of his mouth and stopped only when he thought he tasted iron. Empty-headed and warm, he released the arrow. Rossiu heard nothing until Kittan said, “Hmm. Let’s go check it out.”

He didn’t remember seeing Kittan pick his bow back up, or following Kittan into the brush. He saw the dead thing, though. A fat gray animal with a back covered in green orbs had slumped onto its side and into a puddle. One arrow stuck out from the side of its head; the other had landed on the ground a few feet behind it and to the right. It didn’t even bleed.

Kittan shrugged. “Eh. Pretty close.”

“I-it’s…”

Rossiu dropped to his knees. He reached out and ran a finger down the animal’s head, from the space between its open, blank eyes down to the tip of its blunt snout. It was dead. He should have known.

“’Course it’s dead,” Kittan grunted. “What’d you think we were doing?”

“I just…” Rossiu didn’t know.

He’d seen dead bodies; old people and stillborn infants prepared for funerals, the silhouette of the flying tanuki the day before. But the freshly dead? This animal had been alive minutes earlier. And Kittan killed it. For food. Rossiu’s lips quivered.

He closed his eyes, brought his hand to his heart, and mouthed, words gushing forth without a sound from his mouth, a prayer.

Kittan dropped to the ground beside him, squinting. “What are you—Rossiu, it’s a  _grapehippo_. It’s half fruit, for fuck’s sake, that’s good for you, right? It barely even can think. What are you doing?”

He didn’t respond until the prayer was complete.  _Peace with our holy Face-God, amen._  “Animals are sacred.”

Kittan shook his head. He patted Rossiu’s back. “Let’s get him back inside and then we can practice your bow and arrow some more, okay?”

“ _Human scum._ ”

Before they had the chance to even whip around to look, a gunmen, gleaming midnight blue and towering above them like an obelisk, landed behind them. It extended a long, heavy arm towards them. Rossiu held his arm over his eyes to veil them from the glare on its surface.

With an oddly gentle shove, Kittan urged Rossiu back behind him. He picked up his bow and locked an arrow into position. “Go inside and get the girls! Now!”

He slipped about on the ground for a moment, but managed to pick himself up and still keep a hold on his bow. Quaking before he could move a single limb, he watched Kittan send the arrow into the jagged teeth of the gunmen. He ran towards it. The arrow bounced off the surface, but Kittan went right ahead and grabbed another from the case and did it again.

Disorganized people. How in the world did they live? Rossiu gathered his breath and sprinted back around the side of the cliff and into the ravine.

He yelled out one word, “Gunmen,” as loudly as he could. The sisters, however, had apparently already heard or seen something or another, and had—thank goodness—dressed as quickly as they could. Armed, Kiyoh and Kiyal charged past him on either side, while Kinon zoomed overhead on the scooter. They were gone almost before Rossiu’s echo had even faded from the rock walls.

He was alone again. Armed with a bow and no arrows, protection and no training, he supposed he was to wait. He put his hands on his knees and doubled over, surprised at how much breath he needed to catch. When he looked up, he saw a ray of sunlight falling like the slice of a knife over the wreckage of the gunmen he’d thought was a face-god, and he heard explosions and tinny growls and whooping battle cries from outside. He plunked to the ground and felt the earth shake underneath him.

How boring, uselessness.

When the Black Siblings returned to the ravine a short while later, they carried the dead grapehippo and the tatters of their clothing. They’d been spared enough, somehow, to cover the least decent parts of their bodies, but even the remnants were in shambles. A sleeve had been ripped clean off Kiyoh’s bodysuit; Kinon’s scarf had disappeared entirely; a strap had snapped in half on Kiyal’s bikini top and stayed on only by how tightly it clung to her skin. Kittan’s shirt hung off his shoulders in shreds like a giant claw had sliced through it, and a whole pant leg dangled from the mid-thigh down by threads.

“I hate the ones with the talons,” Kiyal grumbled. “Do we gotta make new outfits  _again_ , bro?”

Kittan replied with a gesture that was half shrug and half nod, resigned. “Unless we can find another village. We were gonna have to get moving out, anyway.”

Kiyoh suggested Adai. Kittan and Rossiu refused in one voice at the same moment.

After partaking in the sacrifice of the blessed grapehippo—the grape half only, for Rossiu—the siblings patched the scraps of their outfits together by whatever means necessary to keep them on for the rest of the day. The girls stayed in the ravine; Kiyoh and Kiyal sparred each other with their weapons of choice, while Kinon kept to herself and the scrap metal at the back, jerry-rigging it into this or that. Kittan took Rossiu back out to the oasis, under the shade of the fallen gunmen, to pick up where they’d left off.

“Why didn’t you take this one back inside?” Rossiu asked. His arrow sailed past the clump of vegetation Kittan had tossed together as a target.

“’Cause we’re leaving tomorrow. We can’t carry that much. Keep your back straight.”

He wondered if he was sabotaging himself, Kittan had to adjust his positioning so much. The best he could do was to get the arrows to graze the very edge of each target, whizzing past a rebellious blade of grass. Rossiu shook too much. By sunset, when the siblings took to packing their belongings into overstuffed saddlebags, Kittan decided he’d train him on something else next time. Rossiu climbed into bed, unsure how he felt about it.

He’d watched something die up here, on the surface, in heaven. He lay there, listening to Kittan breathe once more, and tried to train himself to quit thinking of it as heaven. It just wasn’t. He hadn’t died; he had ascended a staircase and walked out into a desert in the middle of the night. Once, years ago, when he was just starting his duties as his assistant, he’d asked the Father why the Face-God chose those He did for heaven.

“He chooses the people who love others so much more than themselves that they don’t know it,” he answered. “They accept the fate prescribed for them and make the sacrifice because they put the happiness of others before that of themselves.”

“But how is it a sacrifice, if they’re going to heaven?”

“Because they never get to see the people they love so much again.”

“They’re not allowed back to Adai?”

“They do not come back. Heaven is permanent.”

“…So they die?”

“They are dead to us, Rossiu.”

Dead people went to heaven. He felt Kittan wobble backwards and slump against him, his skin pressing into Rossiu’s own. Rossiu was not dead.

Kiyoh shook Rossiu and Kittan awake in the morning, before the sun rose. Groggy, they dressed—Kittan, by now, had torn the near-severed pant leg from the rest of the garment—and loaded the saddlebags onto the nakibashiri and Kinon’s scooter. The siblings draped themselves in black cloaks, the hoods of which were embroidered with toothy, wide-eyed faces in all sorts of colors. Kittan pulled Rossiu under his cloak and told him he’d be riding with him on his nakibashiri today.

And that he’d be steering.

As if Kittan shifting Rossiu around in his lap on the back of the woolly thing didn’t make him writhe in his own nerves enough, Rossiu couldn’t see a thing in the blackness of the cloak. “Where is—”

“Feel around, okay? It’s not that hard,” Kittan said. “Slip your hand under the bottom and hold onto his tail. You gotta learn.”

Rossiu fumbled, but eventually the warm desert breeze brushed past his fingers, and he leaned forward. He grazed the shaft of the tail and latched on like he’d die otherwise. “Now what?”

“Whistle.”

“I can’t whistle.”

“Oh, come on, Rossiu!” Kittan groaned. “Everybody can whistle.”

His hands tightened around the animal’s tail. “I’ve never been able to whistle.”

“It’s not a sin, is it? Look, just—” he grabbed Rossiu by the shoulder and angled him halfway around. He put his forefinger and thumb to his lips and blew.

They both yelped when the nakibashiri took off on its own.

“Hold on!” Kittan was screaming. “Hold on and steer it straight ahead! Holy shit! Hold on!”

“I’m holding, I’m holding!” Rossiu was screaming back.

The tighter he held, the steadier the animal ran. Purely by accident, Rossiu found that he had stiffened his back ramrod-straight when his shoulders collided with Kittan’s chest. He recoiled audibly, but he found after a moment that if he sat up straight and kept both his hands on the tail, the ride grew smoother. Granted, Kittan’s chest pressing against his back and his hands on his hips shook a nervous kind of distraction into him, but strangely, he could ignore it. Maybe he just melted into it.

The sunlight slipped in through the stitches in the cloak’s fabric. They headed east, towards the entrance to Adai. A shadow fell over them, the mesa with the cave in which Rossiu had stayed. He imagined the next exiled Adai villager finding his poncho and his bolero and his empty backpack there and wondering how long ago he’d been raptured. He guided the nakibashiri blindly past where he knew Adai’s entrance sat. They continued on.


	4. 4

They rode for five days, rising at dawn and stopping just before sundown, largely in a precision-straight line over the land. Kittan asked Rossiu at one point if there was somewhere he thought he was going, but Rossiu didn’t answer. Other than that, the five of them talked. Each bound of the nakibashiri gave someone else a chance to speak. The Black Siblings talked about people they’d met, and the villages in which they’d met them, and particular fights against beastmen they chose to remember. Rossiu asked them questions. And when they asked him questions in turn, he talked about Adai.

He could have fallen off that nakibashiri that they didn’t find him a spectacular species of boring. He remembered more and more how his voice actually sounded.

Initially, they stopped only to eat, fight off marauding gunmen and dispatch their respective hybrid pilots, and sleep; the last two hours of fading light were spent training.

The first day, Kittan and Rossiu each took a pair of razor-sharp fan-blades and sparred with them. He said Kiyal used to use them. “I quit for a reason, bro,” she said. By nightfall, Kiyoh had to mix a whole new little bowl of salve to decontaminate the wounds on Rossiu’s arms. Kittan had received one vertical gash down his bare shin where Rossiu dropped one of his blades. Rossiu refused to use them afterward.

The second day, Kinon approached Rossiu, for what he could swear was the first time, and gave him a large, shoulder-mounted machine. “I-it’s a missile,” she stammered. “Y-you can shoot the flammable water out of it. I-I use it sometimes, but I can make another. You can have it…”

Rossiu winced at the last second before pulling the trigger and blew up a small storage of stockpiled spheres of flammable water. Kiyal, at least, found the sky-high explosion a thing of particular beauty. They moved right along.

The third day, Kittan told Rossiu to put up his fists. “You just look like your arms got longer. And nubbier,” he said, tossing his head back and sighing. Yet again. “Guess we can’t train today, I need some time to think of another idea. I shoulda known fistfighting woulda been outta the question. Look at you.”

He said that a lot.

The fourth day, they at last found new clothing. A rock painted a venomous shade of purple marked the hiding place of the staircase that led them down to Shoubou Village. Apparently, the Black Siblings had quite a bit of fame and more than a bit of respect; any villagers who could receive news of the surface knew about them. The tailors measured the siblings, as well as Rossiu, and worked overnight to fashion them brand new outfits. They received matching tan gloves. Kinon and Kiyal, at least, came out less scantily clad than before, but Kiyoh managed to show even less. Still, such a nice woman. Rossiu kept his shirt, sash, and boots, and got new pants.

The Shoubou boys, paralyzed by their lack of worth, kept at a distance from the sisters and only gazed, dewy-eyed. They were eclipses to them, rare interplanetary transits they’d have only this one opportunity in their mayfly existences to see. They could never have them. Kiyoh didn’t notice. Kinon didn’t want to notice. Kiyal didn’t care.

The Shoubou girls, however, rushed toward Kittan like photons to a black hole. He kept flicking his eyes back to Rossiu over the throngs, and told him later, when he’d burst through the orbit of them, that they wouldn’t have done that several years earlier. Rossiu tried to imagine a time when he’d been just Kittan, from Bachika Village, and not Kittan of the Black Siblings. He was still Rossiu, from Adai Village, after all.

On the fifth day, after they left Shoubou Village at daybreak and turned to head north, they set up camp in the afternoon on the bank of an oasis. Kittan ushered Rossiu away to the dry, empty land a rather long walk from the camp. He gave Rossiu a long, sharp blade. Kittan told him not to call it a sword; just let it function as one. He himself grabbed a wide, olive-colored polygon that had once been a part of the gunmen that brought them together and told Rossiu to come at him.

Rossiu clutched the handle—really just the shaved-down, blunt end of it, wrapped in some kind of tape that stuck to his palms the longer he clung to it—and looked first at it, then at Kittan with his makeshift shield, and back and forth.

He felt absolutely ridiculous.

He stood there, in the middle of the arid, cracked plains, holding the fifth weapon he was supposed to wield in six days. Nothing had worked. And Kittan stood across from him, bracing himself, waiting for this one to do just that, to work, to be successful. Rossiu made a face; he couldn’t quite tell what. Kittan had to be setting himself up for disappointment. What kind of masochist was he? Ever polite, Rossiu clamped his eyes shut, raised the sword high into the air, and rushed towards Kittan.

It swept across something before it flew from his hands and stabbed into the ground.

Rossiu froze there, still in position, holding an invisible sword. His mouth twisted into the same peculiar, wiggly tightness he’d felt before—or perhaps it had never come undone—and he reached for the sword. He couldn’t get his arms to even move before he heard Kittan cry out, “Watch the fuck out, Rossiu! You almost sliced my head in half!”

When he turned and looked at him, he almost, for a second, wished he had.

Long strands of blond hair littered Kittan’s shoulders, bright tiger-stripes against his black shirt. With one hand, he was brushing off his popped collars as if to shake his neck free of insects, and with the other, he stroked the hair at the top of his head. Rossiu chopped his ponytail clean off. In its place, that light hair shot forward in a wild shock, uneven and higher in the front than in the back. Kittan tried to smooth it down, maybe to see if he’d still be able to tie it back. There was no way. Even that one renegade strand that had fascinated Rossiu so deeply had entered into the fray.

“ _Holy shit, what did you do?!_ ” Kittan screamed.

And Rossiu collapsed to his knees and buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t do anything. He sobbed over Kittan’s harsh barking.

The whole time he’d been on the surface, he hadn’t cried. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he had. Years in Adai, assisting the Father in presiding over funerals, and expulsions, and vigils after stillbirths, going to bed every night after his mother was cast out and thinking of her, and he hadn’t cried. He didn’t even cry when he had to leave. The last time he cried was when he was just a child, one of the smallest in the village, and his mother left. After that, nothing else really mattered.

“I can’t do this,” he sputtered. “I don’t do this type of thing. I’m not like you.”

Kittan stopped. He stopped moving, and he stopped talking.

“I tried. I can’t do this. I can’t do anything for you!”

Kittan’s hand slid down his face. When he wiped his forearm to dry his eyes, Rossiu saw Kittan dropping to the ground in front of him. He felt Kittan’s hand on the back of his head, fingers weaving through his hair, and he looked up, through the tears, into his eyes. He wasn’t expecting him to hug him, but then he did, and his arms fell limp and he dug his face into Kittan’s shoulder.

“Don’t get like that, come on, Rossiu,” he said. “Ugh, Kiyoh said this would happen.”

Rossiu sniffled just to keep crying.

“She said I oughta stick with the first thing I gave you and keep practicing with it. But I wanted to try to find your natural—uh,” his chin rubbed Rossiu’s back as he shook his head. “The—the damn—thing you’re good at. So we could just get you started on that and then you’d be better at it real quick. Your natural aptitude. Everybody’s got one.”

“I’m not good at anything,” Rossiu choked.

He squeezed him. “ _Stop it._ You’re at least good at riding the nakibashiri, lemme tell you what. Kinon still won’t even touch those things, she’s scared to death.”

Rossiu stifled a moan.

“Look, you’re really good at it, okay? If you’re good at that, you gotta be good at something else. Or at least be able to be good at something else. We just gotta find it.”

He squeezed Kittan back. “What if we don’t?”

Kittan backed away. He held Rossiu by the shoulders, shaking him just with the force of his grip. “What do you want me to say to that, Rossiu, we’re gonna fuckin’—leave you here? ‘Course not, I told you. You’re with us now. Don’t be an idiot.”

He swallowed. He’d soaked the shoulder of Kittan’s shirt.

“My hair’s fine. Now get up.” He stood up and pulled Rossiu with him, not even about to give him the chance to be an obedient little boy like he could have sworn he should be. “Find a rock. We’ll play catch, or whatever.”

Another sniffle. “Catch?”

He gleamed. “So you can throw the flammable water while you ride the nakibashiri. I’m a fuckin’ genius, I dunno why I didn’t think of it before.”

“Y-you think I can do that?” He was holding Kittan’s hand.

“Quit bein’ an idiot and get a rock.”

Kittan shoved him forward. Their hands separated. After another swipe of his forearm across his wet eyes, Rossiu looked around, only partially searching. He told himself to find one roughly the size of the orbs of flammable water. Kittan started to strut away, eyes to the ground, and Rossiu heard his boots scuffing against the barren land until Kiyal called out to him about his nice haircut. He screeched at her to shut up. The last sob wadded up and drained down Rossiu’s throat. His foot hit a stone, golden under the setting sun, and he picked it up and flagged Kittan back towards him. He had a decent arm and made an even better target for catching. Kittan hugged him from the side. Decent. He liked that.


	5. 5

High noon had the worst sunlight for traveling. Rossiu couldn’t see more than the little speckles of light that penetrated the cloak, and when it came beating down from straight overhead, he always had a feeling he’d steer the nakibashiri in the wrong direction. He couldn’t tell where the sun was. He couldn’t tell where he was going. It mattered, for some reason.

Kittan had stopped holding onto his waist by the end of the fourth day out from the ravine, but it wasn’t until the sixth day that he really took note. He’d been riding on his own the whole time. He knew he couldn’t feel Kittan’s chest against his back, not when he’d slung a bag of flammable water balls over his shoulder, just in case, but when he noticed his hands had left, he almost wanted to chuck the bag away. He’d fall, he was sure. The safety dissolved. He wondered if the nakibashiri cared how tightly he gripped its tail.

They had just passed over the crest of a dune when the path before them, the upslope of another, burst into a sandy explosion. Their cloaks blew in the breeze that went with it. Metal laughter. They turned around.

“Where the hell do these guys even come from?” Kittan snarled. Rossiu shook his head to tell him he wondered the same.

Kittan leapt off the bounding nakibashiri and took the cloak with him. Rossiu felt himself dive forward; his face pressed against the animal’s tail. The strap on his bag of explosive spheres began to slip.

Right. Those.

He’d gotten a fair distance away from the siblings before he managed to turn the nakibashiri around. At the foot of the gunmen—a horse-headed, big ugly white thing, sand pouring down the sides of it like a turned hourglass—the four of them raced around it, attacking it as they would, hollering in an asynchronous chorus. Rossiu urged his woolly creature faster. If he’d been given the clearance to join them in their battle cry, maybe he would have considered it. His hair whipped into his eyes.

He had to force his head to turn away so he could bring the bag of flammable water to his front. When he looked ahead again, Kiyal, taking not the least bit of notice, skidded into his path. He jerked to the right with a yelp.

So far, he hadn’t gotten the chance to actually feel one of those balls of water. He reached into the bag and grabbed one, all that would fit in his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he could look at it. Watching the way just took that much more precedence than the swirling black liquid in the thin, lukewarm membrane. It made his palm clammy. At some point, maybe after a number of loops around the feet of the gunmen, Rossiu realized that that was all he was doing. Clinging, circling, not looking, holding. He had to release that orb before it dropped from his hand, hot with condensation, and detonated on the ground.

But really, how? He heard Kittan yelling for him to throw it. He’d only had the time to practice throwing while running on his own feet; they were supposed to start practicing on the nakibashiri that afternoon. The gunmen slammed its fist down onto the sand just behind Rossiu as he ran. Kiyoh, still mounted on her own nakibashiri, took the chance to restrain the hand with her yo-yo, and jerked it to fling the whole machine up into the air, in an arc, and land on its face.

“Rossiu, throw it!” she cried. The gunmen was pushing itself back up.

Rossiu couldn’t see. Even when he did gather the courage to open his eyes, he saw only yellow blurs, the vastness of the sand, and a few black streaks swirling about to muddy it up. He shook his head. “Have Kinon throw one,” he either screamed or thought. He’d hit one of them if he tried, because that was his type of luck. The dark surface of the orb heated and grew sticky under the sun, and he dug his fingers into it.

They either heard him or Kittan just knew him, because he heard him scream out, “Rossiu, come on, what did I tell you?” and then Kinon lifted her missile, the one Rossiu had failed with so spectacularly, onto her shoulder and took aim. The gunmen had gotten back to its feet. Rossiu’s nails sank into the sphere. Blindly, the gunmen lifted its arm and swatted. Kinon took a nosedive and skidded across the sand.

Rossiu heard only the crash of the hand into her jet-scooter. Its echo gave way to the wails of her siblings. He blanked. Free of all thought but to join the rest of the group, he directed his nakibashiri to take a u-turn and run behind the gunmen. Kinon was face down on the side of a dune, her scooter crushed and smoking a few feet away.

But what a bed sand was. As Rossiu caught up with Kittan, he saw Kinon lift her head, trembling, and wave. Kiyal, back on her nakibashiri, hurdled over top of him and rushed to Kinon’s side. She pulled her sister onto the animal’s back.

When Rossiu let out a heavy sigh of relief that he hadn’t even realized he’d taken, he skidded his mount to a halt behind the dune onto which Kinon had crashed. He hunched his shoulders forward, dropping his chin in between them. What an idiot. What an  _idiot,_ Kittan was right. He was the one who was supposed to throw the bomb. Kittan was training him, still, remember, he told himself? It’s convenient! Practical battle experience! It made absolute perfect sense. He heard Kittan calling his name, probably to admonish him. A metallic cackle trilled ahead. Rossiu looked up—at what, he hadn’t yet decided.

…Beastmen, it turned out, were quite stupid.

The gunmen was turning its head to look at the wrecked scooter, howling. It threw its head back. Through wild laughter, it told the Black Siblings, especially Kinon, and possibly Rossiu, that they were stupid and worthless and didn’t stand a chance. Typical beastman rhetoric; even after only a few encounters, Rossiu knew the spiel. It said they had no hope of winning. “I’m the best in this sector!” it hollered.

_Pride is a sin that leads to war. We call this hubris. When a man thinks himself above his peers, it branches to all other sins—anger that he is truly lacking; envy for that which will disprove all testaments to his equality; gluttony for praise; greed to keep himself elevated; lust for the pedestal of authority; sloth when he grows self-righteous. Pride draws men to steal, to hoard, to insult, to kill, toward hedonism. We cannot afford pride. Look around you; look at yourself. You stand on the same ground. You share the same quarters, the same food, the same world, the same God. You are equal. Modesty brings peace. Never forget the God that united us, for He alone has the power to choose among us, and any of us, at any moment, may be chosen. We are one Adai, under one God._

_Rossiu, lead us in prayer._

He narrowed his eyes.

The gunmen shot a missile from which Kittan dove and narrowly avoided. The wind blew Rossiu’s hair about his bare shoulders in the resulting explosion into the sand. He squeezed the globe of flammable water, took aim, wound his arm, and tossed it.

He knocked the gunmen back down, at least, before he blanked again. He almost could see himself steering the nakibashiri out of the way of the blast, heading off towards the west briefly before coming to a halt. He slid off the side of it, just in range enough for him to hear Kittan mouthing off to the gunmen’s pilot, asking him where somebody was, definitely somebody. The nakibashiri let out a whine and plunked to the ground. Rossiu followed, panting.

The siblings stopped in the shade of the gunmen once Kiyoh tossed the beastman pilot off into the horizon as usual. From all that distance, Rossiu watched them, dazed and strangely lightheaded. Kinon was clutching the fur on Kiyal’s nakibashiri, apparently refusing to get off; Kittan shouted until she held her right arm out to the side. Kiyoh pulled some bandages from one of her saddlebags and wrapped it just below Kinon’s shoulder. Wincing quietly, Kinon looked up at her brother, who patted the nakibashiri on the head and let out a laugh that Kiyal mimicked a second after it started, while Kiyoh offered her little sister a drink from her canteen. Rossiu grabbed handfuls of the sand to his sides and released them in time with his settling heartbeat. He looked up at the sky, cloudless and blue and without end. Perhaps half an hour had passed. Early, early afternoon. He faced the east. He closed his eyes and brainstormed set facts.

Kittan woke him up with a light shake on the shoulder. The angle of the sunlight had shifted just so. They had to get moving.

“Is Kinon okay?” he asked.

Kittan nodded. He ran his hand through his hair, scrunching his nose when he remembered what Rossiu had done to it. “That’s my girl. You throw that last bomb?”

“I don’t know what I did.”

 “You did good.”

Under the cloak, Rossiu led the group back on the northward path, feeling more than hearing or seeing or thinking. Snippets of Kittan talking to a quavering Kinon almost non-stop made it to his ears, and he saw enough sun to navigate. He didn’t know how the rest of the day went.

They stopped at the end of the day at the mouth of a canyon. A pool of clear, fresh water sat nearby, and they set up camp in the shade of a high, wide rock arch. Rossiu couldn’t remember wedging himself up against the rocks. Kittan led Kinon out beyond the edge of the lake until the two of them disappeared into the landscape, withering into it, into nothingness.

“We’re awfully lucky we got here,” Kiyoh said, dropping a bundle of dry grasses to the ground to start a fire. “Nakibashiri live here. Kinon needs one now.”

“I thought she was scared of them.” Rossiu pulled his hand into a fist when he didn’t hear a tone in his voice.

Kiyoh sighed. “Yeah. But you saw her when Kiyal pulled her up. Sometimes Kinon just needs to be pushed. It’s a good thing that’s what Kittan’s best at. I think she’ll be fine, they just need to find one.”

Rossiu didn’t answer. His eyes wandered. Off behind Kiyoh, Kiyal scaled a ledge with a bow and arrow and scouted for dinner. He was fumbling with a scrape at the toe of his boot; it would grow into a fully-fledged hole eventually. He couldn’t imagine that Kittan had caused it when the boots were his.

Brushing some flecks of dry brush from her chest, Kiyoh looked over at him. “Are you okay, Rossiu?”

Facing away from the both of them, Kiyal released an arrow. Rossiu nodded. “I’m…I’m going to look for some food.”

“O-oh, okay.” Warily, she watched him get up and brush off the seat of his pants. As he trudged past, she told him to bring back whatever he found so she could make sure it wasn’t poisonous. He nodded and pulled a burlap pouch from one of the saddlebags from his and Kittan’s nakibashiri.

What happened? He glanced around for any signs of vegetation, anything that could possibly be edible at the lakeside, but he looked past, far and away. He’d done what he was supposed to do and thrown the bomb. It downed the gunmen. Kinon was fine, if a bit shaken. He reached down and plucked a possible fruit, an orange, bulbous thing, from a flimsy weed.

Oh, that moment. If he tried, he remembered how it felt. He had a weapon and he was ready to strike, he’d felt the world around him, blowing around him, the air urging him on. The sermon had played for him in the flash of a second. He threw the flammable water.

Really, all he truly felt when he reminisced was the surging supremacy of penance. He thought he was only doing his job, the envoy and the acolyte. Cleanse the sinner. Purify him. Free him. That instant the orb was sailing through the air reinvigorated him.

The first time he stepped up to the altar and stood beside the Father, he felt the gaze of the other forty-eight citizens of his village upon him. He was ten. He’d trained hard enough to assist in giving the blessings. One by one the villagers approached him and bowed before him, a little boy, and asked him to forgive them. And if they asked, they received. He bowed back and guided them to the Father, and after he dotted their closed eyes with water from the Face-God’s lake, they strode away smiling. Rossiu had never been allowed to wrench his lips in one position or another at the altar. He liked to see them leave, though. Until next time, they’d been redeemed.

He wasn’t authorized to adorn anyone with the water. Only the Father could do that. And then Kittan told him he’d done a good job.

He picked a minty-smelling sprig and put it into the bag. Kiyoh told him he’d gathered nothing poisonous.

The sun fell in the west. Kiyal brought back four chasing herons and a fat starchy bulb she couldn’t name. On the back of a warbling nakibashiri, Kittan and Kinon returned just before their sisters and Rossiu fed their scraps to their tiny herd, the last task shy of putting out the fire to go to sleep.

“You missed dinner,” Kiyal whined.

Kittan had started to strut up to her, but stopped at the tone of her voice and nothing more. “I didn’t miss nothin’. Gimme that.” He snatched half a heron from her hands.

Kinon yawned and unbuckled her belt. “I’m so tired. I’m not even hungry.”

“No,” Kiyoh urged. “You need to eat. Just have  _something_. Rossiu?”

He turned away from his nakibashiri’s face, hand outstretched with the clawed foot of one of the spare chasing herons. He said nothing.

“Do you have anything left over from what you found?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Huh?” Kittan, in a show of what he probably thought manners, finished off the rest of the pilfered bird in one bite, and promptly hacked a couple of times before sputtering on. “Whaddaya mean, ‘what he found?’ What’d he find?”

Kiyoh smiled at her brother, bright and proud. “Rossiu went and got his own food tonight.”

“Big fat lie! I dug up that big lumpy thing!” Kiyal cried. Kiyoh tried to give her some kind of congratulations, but the whole thing jumbled together into a sort of white-noise.

“What’d you find, Rossiu?” Kittan looked over at him like they’d spent the day chatting. He made his way over to him.

Rossiu shrugged. “A fruit. Some…I don’t know, an herb, I think. Um.”

“Oh.” His hand shot to the back of his neck and gave it a scratch. For a second, his eyes had lingered on Rossiu, who looked back, right into them, but he sent them darting every way available. He stuttered. “H- uh. Mm.”

And then he shrugged. “Least you’re takin’ care of your vegetable thing.”

Kittan turned right back around and faced his sisters, stretching. He said they could go to bed if they wanted; he was going to ‘go make himself tired.’ Whatever that meant. Rossiu watched him shove his hands into his pockets and take off, walking around the perimeter of the lake. He couldn’t see him anymore after he heard him. The nakibashiri stretched out and nibbled the heron foot out of his hand. Whatever anything meant.

He couldn’t sleep. In Shoubou, they’d received more blankets, and Rossiu had his own provisional bed now. Out here in the wild, without the stone shield of the cave or the ravine, he shivered into his quilt and tried to keep his eyes closed. They sprang back open every couple of seconds. He returned to the moment right after he threw the oil ball, and found he couldn’t quite remember it. He sat up and looked around; only the girls lay in their piles of blankets. He startled himself with a grunt when he pushed himself to his feet. Kittan was still out ‘making himself tired’; it wouldn’t hurt to join him, would it?

Whatever Kittan did to wear himself out required a lot of walking. Rossiu regretted after only a minute or two not striking up a torch for himself. He lost sight of the camp, and the gentle breathing of the sleeping sisters faded into the night. He had to listen. If a twig snapped or a boot scuffled or an ‘r’ trilled, then he could stop.

The moon, the silver thing, hung overhead, right where Rossiu thought the sun might be if it were midmorning. Pay attention, he told himself. He kept walking.

Instinct hinted to him that Kittan had abandoned him. Why made no difference. He was gone, and Rossiu would wander the canyon unsettled until he starved. With a sigh, he placed his hand on his heart and started to pray. The words hit his ears like an unfamiliar dialect. He wouldn’t have finished even if he hadn’t heard the attempt at a whisper from somewhere to his left.

“Rossiu?”

“Kittan?” He spun around to find Kittan tripping his way out from behind a bush. “Why are you all the way out here?”

He was still plucking fibers of grass from his shirt when he reached him. “I was takin’ a walk. I dunno. I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to sleep after all that, so I…Took a. Walk.” He tossed a burr to the ground and looked at Rossiu, whose eyes finally were adjusting back to the darkness from the moonlight.

“I dunno,” he continued, shrugging. “People always say you shouldn’t move around so much before you try to sleep ‘cause it’ll keep you up, but sometimes I just gotta. I walk until I get tired, like, yawning and shit, and then I can sleep.”

Rossiu’s fingers fidgeted together. “Hmm.”

“What are you doin’ up?”

Rossiu had started to look down, but Kittan tapped his shoulder and beckoned him to follow. They walked. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Not tired, or—you just—what’s up?”

He kept his eyes on the darkened ground. More and more he could determine which lump below was a rock, which was a fruit, and which was a fat, scurrying beetle. He didn’t answer for a long time.

“I felt strange all day,” he said at last.

“Happens.”

“Ever since we were fighting the gunmen.”

“Fucker didn’t hurt you, did he?”

He shivered back. “N-no. I just…I don’t know, Kittan. I threw the flammable water like you told me, and then I don’t know what happened.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘you don’t know what happened,’ you were right there!”

“I don’t remember it happening. I know I did it, but I can’t remember it.”

“Probably you were scared.”

Had he been? He touched his fingers to his lips, trying to recall. All he could dredge up was the sermon. He jogged to catch up with Kittan, taking long strides, hands still in his pockets. There was a second where he glanced up at him, just to make sure he was exactly side-by-side with him, and he saw Kittan looking up at the sky. The moon hit him almost like daylight.

He wasn’t frowning. Rossiu caught himself fixing on it. The first time he’d ever seen Kittan, he glowered like a predator, and Rossiu had never seen a look like that before. He knew only the reticent glare of Adai ire, a sort of passive-aggressiveness each villager learned from birth to paint on their faces when they’d been wronged. He’d done it, himself, to Kittan, when he’d badmouthed his pants the one time. When he was under the impression that Kittan had to have been some lesser deity, an employee of the cosmos, he wracked his brain for just what kind of anger could have spawned him: he could have been a demon, the son of a war god, one of the Four Horsemen the Father read of in the scriptures. Kittan looked up into the night sky, neither frowning nor calm. The apprehension slid out of Rossiu’s body like water between fingers.

“…I feel like I shouldn’t have done it,” he said.

“What?” Kittan shot his eyes down at him. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I’m not ready. I…I want to be ready to do all this, Kittan, I really do. I want to help all of you however I can, since you’ve all been so kind to me. Too kind. And I can’t do it.”

“Quit it.”

“I did it today and I was scared I would hit you, and then I just…Heard the beastman in there go on and on and—Kittan, I don’t understand it. How are they able to control them?”

He stopped, and Rossiu stopped with him. “What, the—how are the beastmen able to control the gunmen? I dunno, Rossiu, they got controls and shit in there, I ain’t a mechanic.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense!” his hands curled into fists. “The gunmen are so powerful, and it takes four of—fi—four people just to get one to the ground, and every time there’s only one beastman inside. How are they able to do it? What do they do?”

“Rossiu—”

He felt himself tearing up. “What are they? What are the beastmen? How can they control the face-gods, it doesn’t—”

He and Kittan, in that second, were mirrored, looking into each other’s faces. Kittan dropped to the ground and pulled Rossiu with him.

“The fuck,” Kittan growled. “Are you talkin’ about?”

Rossiu had started to cry again. He hid his eyes behind his wrists. What a waste, he thought, spending the whole day asking what was wrong, why did he feel so weird, and he felt Kittan’s hands on his shoulders. What an idiot.

He pulled his legs to his chest and rubbed his forehead into his knees. “I-in my village…I-I…I th-think there’s a gunmen.”

“What?” Kittan roared. “And we just left? Shit, Rossiu, why didn’t you say anything?”

“It doesn’t have a pilot,” he answered. He took a deep breath to sniffle back a sob. Idiot. Idiot, idiot, idiot for being so quiet. “At least I don’t think it does. It’s never moved. It sits in the lake I told you about, where we get the weeds.”

“How do you know it’s—why do you think it’s a gunmen?”

“I-I just knew after I saw the first one, the one you saved me from. The thing in Adai is a big stone head. I just…Know it, Kittan.”

He lifted his head to wipe his eyes, but Kittan zipped his hand from his shoulder to brush a tear away with his thumb. He was leaning forward. He didn’t say a word.

Rossiu inhaled deeply. A sudden throb in his head told him he’d sniffled too much, too fast, but he ignored it, choked it back. “It’s our god. The whole religion revolves around it.”

“What are you doin’ thinkin’ a gunmen’s a god?”

“Nobody  _knows_ it’s a gunmen, Kittan. It doesn’t move. It just sits there.”

“Still.”

He sighed. Kittan kept his eyes, a murky bluish shade the same as the rocks behind him, set on Rossiu. Keep going. “We didn’t…We didn’t always have the religion—” Kittan wiped his eye again. “—th-thank you. W-we didn’t always have it. The Father took over as our leader when I was very, very little, before I can remember. My mother told me things were much worse before he was in charge. People used too much of our resources, and then they started to fight over them, but he figured out that if we kept our village at a set population, we could manage. So he taught us about all the things we needed to do to conserve our resources, and to get along with each other. He said the Face-God made it all possible.

“It had been in Adai for as long as anybody could remember, just sitting in the water. Nobody questioned it. It was perfectly logical, really. It was always there looking over us, and nobody knew where it came from. And he had a book. He read from it to everyone. So when he said that the face created us, and that it had given us all these guidelines to live by, everybody believed him. My mother believed him. She used to take me down to the lake and talk to me about it, but I can’t always remember what she said. All I know is, I believed him.”

He cleared his throat, amazed Kittan was still letting him continue.

“We also had a staircase to the surface. It had been there probably as long as the Face-God, near as any of us could guess. He told us the Face-God put it there for the chosen individuals. Whenever a baby was born, he would choose among us and send us to heaven.”

“The surface,” Kittan said.

He nodded. “I believed all of it, even after the Face-God chose my mother. I decided to train to become the Father’s assistant, and he saw me as worthy, and by the time the Face-God chose me, he told me I was on track to take over for him someday. But there was still a lot I had to learn, so…”

Suddenly, he wasn’t sure where to go. He eased his body a bit, pushed his legs forward, and leaned back. When he sighed, it came back. “…I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. It’s just…When I came up and the gunmen attacked me, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t even know what it was when you saved me from it. I thought it was some kind of animal. And then when I looked at it again, I realized it had that big face on it and I knew it had to be a face-god. Nothing made sense. I thought I was up in heaven, and then it attacked me, and then you all came, and I didn’t know what you were. Angels or devils or something, I had no idea. I didn’t want you to think I—I don’t know. And…

“…And everything up here is real. It’s all real. You’re real. I’m alive. I thought going up the stairs to heaven meant we died. You even told me I didn’t die, I just…I still don’t understand. I don’t understand it up here.”

Kittan, still with his hands on Rossiu, inched himself forward while pulling him close. He brought Rossiu into a hug.

“They’re not gods, are they?” Rossiu asked. His head flopped onto Kittan’s shoulder. At some point, it seemed, he’d grown sleepy.

“Like hell they are,” he replied. “They’re just big robots and beastmen make ‘em go.”

“Do you think there is a god?”

Kittan waited a long time. But even when he finally broke the air with a shrug, Rossiu looked up, eager. “Dunno. We never really talked about that typa stuff in Bachika.”

Bachika. Rossiu blinked just to clarify his focus.

He remembered Kittan only talking about Bachika Village once, in tandem with Kiyoh, the day they’d met. In all the time Rossiu had spent with the Black Siblings, they never spoke any more of it. He hadn’t even heard the village’s name from Kinon or Kiyal. Kittan started to frown, and Rossiu moved his hand to his side to place it on top of Kittan’s. He gave it a light squeeze.

“What was your village like?” he asked.

Kittan sucked his lips in between his teeth and looked away. “Really great,” he nodded after a second, to himself. “Really great. Had a lot of cool stuff. Like, haha, every year we had this big…Sort of a party typa thing? We just did it, never named it, I dunno. ‘Bout everyone in Bachika was a musician. Everyone made food and played music just nonstop for a long-ass time. We knew about the surface and all, ‘cause something, I dunno what, a rockslide or something, probably, opened up this…Hole that was sorta big enough. We sent people up to get food sometimes. Anyway, we’d get people from other villages or people from the surface showing up, and they’d stick around for the party. It was awesome. We always sorta lost track of the time.”

He was squeezing Rossiu’s hand back.

“You really liked it, didn’t you?” Rossiu asked.

Kittan nodded. And he nodded, and he nodded, until he nodded so slightly that he didn’t nod anymore.

Rossiu was falling asleep. “…Can you play any music?”

“If I still had the drums, maybe. I bet I couldn’t remember.” He sighed. “You oughta ask Kiyoh to sing sometime, she’s real good at it. Our parents taught us everything. ‘Cept Kinon and Kiyal never really got around to learning anything. They were too little. But yeah, I dunno, I probably couldn’t remember, it’s been such a long time. Ha, I ain’t got the typa memory you seem like you got.”

For some reason, Rossiu’s face flushed. “What?”

“Usin’ all those big words all the time!” Kittan broke his hand away from Rossiu’s to wave it about, miming some type of explosion. “I dunno how you remember that many words. Like, goddamn, Rossiu, every time you open your mouth I don’t know what the fuck I’m hearing. Maybe it’s just ‘cause I gotta listen to myself all the time. You’re  _how_  old?”

“Fourteen.”

“See, how the hell? I think that’s how old Kiyal is and you hear her. Sounds like a little girl me. I dunno what she thinks she’s doing. But seriously, Rossiu, I ain’t ever heard anybody talk like you. Got this big ol’—know all these words. Talkin’ all smart. It’s fuckin’ scary. But I like hearin’ it. I dunno why.”

He felt like maybe he should thank him. Rossiu didn’t speak.

Kittan was shaking his head again. “You’re somethin’ else, Rossiu. Swear, every time you say something, I’m like, ‘what the hell,’ and then I’m like, ‘why the hell,’ ‘cause I never know what you’re gonna say. Just that it’s gonna take me, like, forever to figure it out. I wish you talked more.” He looked away.

There was that flush again. “…Why?”

“I dunno,” he muttered. “I just never know. I’m glad you’re asking me shit, ask me whatever you want. Whenever you want. I just can’t…I dunno, fuckin’ predict you. After we first met, I thought you were gonna be like, ‘oh, this is a sin,’ ‘that’s a sin,’ and be all…Act like I ain’t doin’ shit right. But you don’t. You aren’t. You’re pretty cool.”

Rossiu froze. All he knew was that it was a compliment. Kittan would not let up. He shied into himself, curling up, and stared into his lap. “Y-you too, Kittan. I…I like you a lot.”

“Heh.” His thumb stroked Rossiu’s wrist.

“A-and—heh, your hair really does look fine.”

“I gotta get used to it still. Haha, it’s so weird…”

It was awfully chilly.

“…Uh. S-Sorry I didn’t talk to you a whole lot today, by the way,” Kittan added after a while. Rossiu had already started to close his eyes. “I just, y’know, got really worked up about Kinon. I tried to ask if you were okay, fuckinnnn’…” he yawned. “Rrrrright before I came out here, and then I just kinda went, ah, fuck it, it’s been all day.”

Rossiu made a sound, something or another. His head was rolling into Kittan’s chest. “S’okay.”

“…You feelin’ better?”

“Mmm.”

“You really did do a good job.”

“Thank you.”

“…Rrr—mmm. Really good. Really good.”

“Mmm.”

“Night, Rossiu.”

“Nh.”


	6. 6

“I just felt so powerful then.”

At some point, the sunrise spread into the sky and woke them up, and they went right on talking as if they’d never stopped. They’d fallen asleep right there, in the middle of the canyon; Kittan fell back in the night and brought Rossiu down with him, and Rossiu woke up with his head on Kittan’s chest and didn’t bother to move. Kittan stayed put as well. That early in the morning, it was far too warm there to risk breaking apart. If, at any moment, they wanted to go back to sleep, they could have.

“Well, good,” Kittan replied. His arm lay on the ground, bordering Rossiu’s body, flush against his. He kept it far enough away. It never touched him. “’Bout time you did.”

“But that’s why it felt so strange. I was watching the gunmen and I felt like I had to do it, like I just…” he shook his head, cheek rubbing against Kittan’s shirt. “…Like I  _had_ to.”

“You kinda did. I mean, shit, Rossiu, Kinon went down, and he was up there all, ‘ohh, I’m the best, fuck you guys.’ Took longer than I woulda, but at least you did it. Someone’s gotta do it.”

He shifted. When he woke up, he thought he’d had the words for it, for what had happened. They’d swirled around his head all the previous day, and in his sleep, they settled; in the murky limbo during which he was awake, but had yet to recognize it, the words funneled out into a coherent order, and he thought he knew. Now, though, his mouth put up a block, and his fingers twitched to ball up little folds of Kittan’s shirt every time he tried to speak. “I know, but…After I did it, I just…I wanted to leave it up to you all, I suppose. I’m really not ready for this.”

Kittan had slept in his boots, and he dug a heel into the dust when he bent his leg. “You keep sayin’ that, goddamn, Rossiu, you’re way too hard on yourself.”

“Do you really think I’m ready?”

“You gotta be ready. All the time. It’s too fucked up around here for not—for you to not be ready. You got a thing you can do, okay? Just throw the damn things, I’m tellin’ you.”

“You don’t think I need to train more?”

“You gotta train all the time. You don’t just—there isn’t, like, a damn…” he drew a line in the air with his fingers. “Thing you get to, a level or something, that says you’re ready, or you’re the best, or whatever. You gotta go and go and go and just practice all the time. Even if…Even if you sorta suck right now, doesn’t mean you can’t throw a damn ball.”

Rossiu shifted again, brought his knee away from Kittan’s thigh. Kittan dug his heel into the ground once more, and added, “I ain’t sayin’ you suck, either. You just gotta do it.”

Closing his eyes, Rossiu sighed. His body, lethargic with frustration, fell limp. “I had to train all the time in Adai.”

“Thought you guys weren’t supposed to fight.”

“Training under the Father,” he stated. “It went in all these levels. After the Father taught me how to do a certain set of things, I could move on to learn more. It kept going like that. I wasn’t allowed to learn new tasks until I’d mastered some first. Like, when I was first starting, I wasn’t allowed to lead everyone in prayer until I learned the proper way to carry the Father’s supplies to the altar, the candles and whatnot. And after I was given the authority to lead the village in prayer, he taught me the way to speak the final blessings for couples at their wedding, and…Hold the jar at the expulsion ceremonies. When I was expelled, I still wasn’t allowed to anoint anyone with the lake water. There was still a lot only the Father was allowed to do.”

“Yeah, well,” Kittan patted Rossiu on the shoulder. “We ain’t in Adai. You’re with us. It doesn’t work like that with us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What’re you sorry for? Don’t be sorry, just throw the things and keep training, okay? You know I’ll help.”

“Thank you.”

“Ahh,” Kittan groaned. His body twisted, slowly; Rossiu started to back away, but Kittan settled back down after a second. He’d thrown his head back. His hand had fallen onto his face to cover his eyes. “There, I’m fuckin’ doing it again, don’t listen to that typa shit, Rossiu. I sound like a dick.”

Rossiu propped himself up on an elbow and peered at him. “A d—”

“—sound like I don’t give a shit. Trust me, okay, I give a shit. I give a shit. I got the worst voice, always comes out wrong.”

“You don’t have a bad voice,” Rossiu said. “It isn’t bad.”

Kittan started to rub at his temples, eyes squeezing shut under the shadow of his hand. “You sure?”

He nodded. “I think it’s interesting. The way you roll your r’s, it’s interesting. I haven’t heard it before.”

“…I do that?”

“Of course you do. You do it when you say my name.” Couldn’t he hear himself? Rossiu sat up and watched him. “You do it all the time. I like it.” He smiled, if only slightly. He felt it in his eyes. In Adai, that was the way proper, modest individuals expressed pleasure with one another. Restrained and unassuming, demure, quiet.  _Never let them know the full extent—they may think themselves greater than they are. Do not give them false hope. They are not the center of our world._

Kittan lifted his hand from his face and looked up at him, at that ghost of a smile. For a fleeting part of a second, he looked as if he might grin back, but his mouth tightened and quavered, then pulled down, far down.  _Rrrrossiu,_ he muttered. He brought both hands to his face and rubbed, furiously, as he sat up. “Don’t look at me like that. You’re bein’…Fuck, just—Rossiu. Th-thanks. How-how ‘bout we—let’s—let’s go.”

His face was red. He took Rossiu by the wrist and led him back to the campsite. The girls were still asleep.

They stayed in the canyon for four days. Late in the morning of the first day, a gunmen attacked; in the midst of his struggle to weave his nakibashiri over the rough terrain without accidentally steering it into the lake, Rossiu counted sixteen heads on it, all joining together to form arms and legs around a central one. It broke apart and reformed a number of times. Face-gods didn’t have sixteen heads. Rossiu managed to hit it a few times. However, Kiyoh couldn’t get her yo-yo around it, with how often it split apart, and Kinon was still too anxious on her nakibashiri to really do much but lead it away for moments at a time. Kittan and Kiyal alone couldn’t fill the void. It got away. Nothing attacked on the second day.

Kiyoh wanted to train with Kittan. He left Kiyal to try to help Kinon with her nakibashiri and told Rossiu to practice riding his own. He told him to throw rocks at the canyon wall.

Throwing rocks at another rock was silly. He thought he heard Kiyal snicker from somewhere a ways away, but when he looked, he found her sitting on a ledge, eyes on her poor sister clinging to the wool of her even more frightened animal. He sighed. He almost fell when he shook his head.

In the afternoon, Rossiu foraged. He returned to the fireside with a leafy twig laden with tiny blue berries and three of the sweet, heavy roots Kiyal had found the day before. Kiyoh told him the berries were poisonous, and then asked why he’d gone and looked for Kittan last night.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. He couldn’t quite get himself to look at her.

Kittan rearranged his pile of blankets that night and set them back up only a foot or so from Rossiu. They wouldn’t have to get up and walk around if they weren’t quite as tired as they should be.

“Was it comfortable in Bachika?” Rossiu asked. “Did you have trouble sleeping there, too?”

Yes. No. They whispered themselves to sleep.

The sixteen-headed gunmen came back the next day, and got away, and came back yet again on the fourth day, only to escape once more. It always fled in the same direction, as if it had seen the five of them charging northward before and took it as some kind of premeditated stampede that it had to thwart.

Kittan wanted the beastman inside it dead. Rossiu told him they should keep going north, then.

The next few days of travel were a hazy pastiche of sand and chatter and the sixteen-headed gunmen showing up apparently whenever it pleased, save for the nighttime. Gunmen never attacked at night, Kiyoh said, two weeks too late. They could never take it down. It scattered and fled every time. Flimsy coward. Rossiu couldn’t be sure if his aim was growing deadlier or if it had fallen into a stasis, but every time he saw the gunmen speeding off into the sunset until it shrank into a dot, flailing against the light of the westward falling sun, he zeroed in on it and wondered if, perhaps, if his arm were long enough, if he could wind up enough, maybe, just maybe, he could strike it like it deserved.

Sometimes they wanted to stop before they’d let themselves. Kiyal mouthed off the most about it, and maybe Kiyoh, on occasion, would suggest that perhaps they could afford a break. Rossiu wouldn’t have stopped even if Kittan hadn’t told them to ‘drop it, we ain’t stopping.’ Sometimes they had to pause, at least, on the searing expanse of the earth. There was no road. Rossiu watched the sun’s path through the cloak, east to west and gone, east to west and gone. Somewhere out there, in the distance, on the far side of the horizon, sixteen faces watched the sun, too, from east to west, possibly backwards, and cowered in fear of the five of them, knowing it would have to approach again just to scatter in shame soon after. Rossiu could smell it.

“Never underestimate a beastman, Rossiu,” Kittan said, leaning forward and growling into his ear. “They’re fuckin’ awful.  _Awful_.”

“I’m not underestimating,” Rossiu replied. “I know they’re awful.”

Five days after leaving the canyon, they heard noises. They reached the edge of a cliff and crouched down, hiding from whatever could have been producing the shouts and the rumbles and the crashes and the screams, the  _screams,_ as if they didn’t already know. Kittan led the way, slowly to keep the nakibashiri quiet, and surveyed the land before the rest.

He signaled the others forth. Down below, a red gunmen grabbed boulders from the land around it and hurled them with graceless swings at a little boy. “Alright, let’s go,” he said. They kept quiet and traversed the cliffside.

It occurred to Rossiu on the way down that, his own rescue aside, he’d only actually heard of the reputation the Black Siblings had as sort of—though he hesitated to use the word—heroes. Until he caught a glimpse of what he could only assume was the boy the gunmen had chosen as its victim, nothing more than a pitch black speck tearing in front of the cloak, the only people he’d seen on the surface were the siblings. They’d mentioned on the road some villages, not unlike Bachika, that the beastmen had destroyed, and the residents, when they survived, had to either locate a new village in which to settle or eke out a living on the surface. Usually, it didn’t last very long.

But the Black Siblings made it their mission, years ago, to not just try to survive, but to save the lives of whomever they came across. Once, they talked about a time they arrived at a village too late to save the infrastructure but just in time to vanquish the gunmen responsible and escort the villagers back to the village they’d left a day or two before. They were ferrymen. Their notoriety made sense then, to Rossiu. Word traveled from the people they’d helped to the people they were brought to, and if that village sadly happened to be destroyed, word would carry to the next village.

“She’s as beautiful as I always thought she’d be,” a boy had said back in Shoubou Village, about which sister, Rossiu hadn’t heard.

“So strong,” a Shoubou girl swooned at Kittan, who peered over her head at Rossiu.

“They’re going to save us all,” they all said.

But he hadn’t gotten to see them actually save anybody, other than, he reluctantly believed, himself. He wondered why they’d kept him around. His wounds had healed. For the longest time, he could barely assist, and still was by no means particularly talented. He wouldn’t complain, of course. He only wondered. Kittan, placing one hand on Rossiu’s hip, took over the steering. The nakibashiri treaded lightly.

“The girls are gonna help us knock the big guy down, and then they’re gonna get the kid,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind watchin’ me kick this beastman’s ass.”

One of Rossiu’s hands had taken a tight hold on the nakibashiri’s fur, while the other clenched around Kittan’s arm. He could feel his slight little jerks and nudges this way and that as he steered the animal just inches in one direction, then another. He remembered Kittan reaching into the mouth of the first gunmen, pulling the hair-covered beastman from it, and yanking it down onto the ground with him.

There was a moment in which Rossiu couldn’t quite tell whether he was curious enough about getting to see a beastman at such close proximity to be comfortable watching Kittan slam his boot, with that sharp, nasty point and the blunt side of the heel, into its face, or wind his arm back to send his fist colliding with it until he had to work to scrub the blood from the knuckles of his gloves, and when he finally wrung them out, the water still ran pink. He forgot, sometimes, that Kittan had the capacity to do that.

The girls sent their voices chirruping into battle mode and chucked a barrage of flammable water at the gunmen. It fell, and they turned sharply to circle around the boy. Kittan slowed the nakibashiri to a lazy, victorious strut. Rossiu held on. They scaled the fallen gunmen like they owned it.

“Throw one,” Kittan said. “Aim for his teeth.”

Rossiu had held an orb of the black oil in his hand since Kittan had taken over. Squinting, he reached under the hem of the cloak. Sand whipped about and hit his skin when he wrenched his arm back. One big light area stood out just enough to satisfy him, and he did as told. Kittan grabbed him by the hips and sent them both rolling down the side of the nakibashiri, whose tail Kittan pulled at the last second to send it speeding off toward the girls. They clung to each other and to the metal. It burned. Kittan kept the cloak on around the both of them when he led Rossiu up through the clearing dust and smoke.

“The hell?” came a voice.

Inches away from a beastman, Kittan shoved Rossiu to the side, careful to keep him holding on to his waist, and kicked something solid that fell back. He stood up straight. Rossiu almost couldn’t see his face in the darkness that high up, like the summit of a mountain disappearing into clouds.

“Get ready to die, you furry bastard,” Kittan snarled, holding his fist outside of the cloak. He spat the words. Rossiu could see his teeth, if nothing else, sharp and carnivorous. He was holding onto Kittan by the hot metal of his belt buckle and the small of his back, and he tightened his grip.

“Beastman? What? Get outta here.”

Rossiu watched as Kittan stiffened. Easing his arm just a bit, he blinked.

And then the beastman, were it a beastman, sent something just fistlike enough into Kittan’s face, and he flew back. Rossiu stumbled a step or two after him and yelped out his name until he realized the cloak had gone straight down with Kittan. He stood under the sun, eyes wide, with Kittan on his back next to him and a gunmen under his feet. He looked around, taking his time to study the flat, desiccated land around him. He turned to finally finish the panorama, unarmed, defenseless, and trembling.

It was a human.

A young man, probably not any older than Kittan, stood with his arm still frozen in the follow-through of his punch. He stared at Rossiu and Rossiu stared back. He had hair the color of the sky. A cape was draped around his shoulders, the same color as the surface of the gunmen and his eyes, this deep, burning scarlet.

As soon as Rossiu looked at those eyes of his, they locked him in. A sequence of concentric, dark circles radiated out from the center, and even when Rossiu tried to move out of the way of them, closer towards himself and less zoomed in, he caught sight of his eyelashes, these thick things, unnatural things, two black hedgerows encircling these bright, gleaming rubies to conceal them from an undeserving world. And when he managed to move still further back, a pair of long eyebrows swept and arched down, maybe in pain, maybe insulted, maybe confused, maybe deciphering, maybe all at once. Rossiu’s teeth slid against one another. He looked away, and it was only when he managed to peek back up at him that he noticed the tattoos, the rest of him, his body. He wanted to keep looking at his eyes. He clutched his hands to his chest and felt his heart shudder while the rest of him froze.

“What’s all this about, Forehead?” the boy asked.

Before he could reply—and before he really figured out that he was supposed to be “Forehead”—Rossiu heard Kittan grunt behind him. Rubbing his head through the cloak, he got back to his feet, shaking. “He’s a human?” When Kittan tossed the hood of his cloak off, he was looking at Rossiu.

“Yes,” he answered, turning back again to look at him. Before the word even entirely left his mouth, he started searching for confirmation whether he was correct. Of course he was human. It just didn’t feel right. Human didn’t cover it. He and the boy watched each other, straightening their backs and easing everything else.

“I’m sorry,” he added, when the boy only let his teeth poke through the space between his lips. “We thought you were a beastman, attacking that boy down there.”

He seemed to have forgotten about Kittan. He leaned in towards Rossiu, eyes blazing. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Don’t you fuckin’ talk to him like that.” Kittan placed his hand on Rossiu’s arm and pulled him close until his shoulder hit his hip.

Rossiu looked up at him and found the two older boys face-to-face, locked in a glare that charged the inert space between them like a clap of thunder, lightning pulsing through the stone-gray clouds and branching and expanding and painting it, fleetingly, like marble. He shrank below them, into the derelict presence of the machine on which they stood. Of course human didn’t cover it; this boy was piloting a gunmen.

In the middle of the circle of the sisters, the dark-haired boy they’d come to save called out one word, “Bro,” and the stare-down ended. Kittan wouldn’t let go. Rossiu just waited and clung back.


	7. 7

Even with the girls and the pale little boy approaching them on the fallen gunmen, Kittan could only contain himself for a moment. Rossiu watched as he grabbed the blue-haired boy by the gold clasps of his cape and yanked him towards him.

“No way, y’know what?” Kittan bellowed. “You keep askin’ us who the hell  _we_ are. Who the hell are  _you,_ dick?”

Long eyebrows arching down in graceful sweeps, he howled back, shoving his face right back into Kittan’s. “You wanna know who the hell I am? Well, listen up, buddy, I’ll tell you!”

Rossiu honestly couldn’t be sure if he’d jerked himself free or if Kittan had let go, but the boy stepped back and stood as straight as he thought a spine could go. He’d been waiting for someone to ask. Rossiu, still clinging to Kittan’s side, inched forward to listen, if only to be polite. If. Down on the ground, the girls stopped and listened, and the other boy started to swell up with a wide grin and brightening eyes. He was blushing.

“Bursting through the ceiling of Jiiha Village,” from nowhere, it seemed, he produced a pair of pointy orange sunglasses and donned them. “Storming the surface and taking out every beastman he sees,” he grabbed the edge of his cape and swished it around, into the wind as if waving the skull emblazoned on the back of it like a flag. “A man who surrenders to no one…Whose name parents use to make their children behave,” he rocketed his finger up to the sky like he dared to challenge the entire expanse of it. “A paragon of masculinity—when people talk about Team Gurren’s leader, Kamina, they’re talkin’ about  _me._  Who the hell do you think I am?”

He echoed. Part of Rossiu wanted to shrink away in embarrassment that he’d surely forgotten long ago, but he’d been utterly transfixed. Kamina had a voice like the sun, this huge, bright thing Rossiu was sure he wouldn’t be able to escape no matter where he went. Glowed; it glowed, he glowed. Rossiu studied every inch of him standing there, all tall and fierce and sturdy like some kind of elegant monolith. He’d believed every word. In that instant, he couldn’t doubt that somebody like Kamina had the ability to control a gunmen. He wondered if he could boast so triumphantly because he’d ended up in control of it, or if his piloting endowed him with conceit, or if it was this cyclical thing, regal and privileged. But he spoke like he deserved it. Rossiu saw his eyes from behind the glare shooting off his sunglasses and tried, under his breath, to curse himself for trying to justify such pride.

Rossiu thought he’d hung in midair onto every word out of Kamina’s mouth, until he looked up at Kittan and saw his lips tight and quivering. He wouldn’t take his eyes off Kamina. His fists were clenched like he’d strike at any second. As furious as Kittan may have appeared, Rossiu knew he hadn’t seen that exact blaze in his eyes before. He stroked up and down Kittan’s wrist and fixed back on Kamina.

“So, what’s up, Eyebrows? Forehead?” Kamina asked, pushing his sunglasses up just a fraction of an inch on the bridge of his nose. “You guys got names?”

Kittan shook. Rossiu thought he saw him shoot a fleeting look down at him, but before he could double-check, Kittan whistled as loudly as he could. His sisters, who had at some point leapt off their nakibashiri to let them warble and regroup some yards away, dragged the boy with them to scale the gunmen. They let him approach Kamina, who grabbed him and introduced him as Simon—his “soul brother”—while they joined their brother. The three of them stared at Kamina all the while with this oddly familiar, goggle-eyed wonder. Kamina glanced from one girl to the next. His approving smirk gave way to a whistle. Kittan, barely silencing his growl, broke away from Rossiu to just begin lifting his fist into the air.

Kiyoh, thankfully, stepped in just before Kittan had a chance to strike or yell or worse. “We’re the Black Siblings. We hunt beastmen,” she said, and Rossiu, under his breath, thanked her. If anyone here could avert a crisis, it was Kiyoh. She and her sisters finally broke their ring around Kamina and moved back over to their brother. Closing his eyes, Rossiu smiled to himself and listened as, one by one, his companions introduced themselves. What a relief that he knew these people.

And then there was a pause. Dead silence. Rossiu had to open his eyes for it, just to make sure something hadn’t happened while he’d zoned out, and found everyone looking at him, staring, like he’d done something wrong. He frowned.

“ _Rossiu_ ,” Kittan hissed.

“What?”

“Say your damn name!”

“Wh—” Introductions, of course. Kittan was still glaring at him, seething. Rossiu glanced from him to the smug, expectant Kamina and back again.

…Oh, this was just childish. Everyone just made such a big deal out of it, with this whole spiel. He tried, for a second, to think where he fit in the family chronology before deciding it didn’t matter; he wasn’t related anyway. Rossiu took the high road and once again bypassed what he didn’t know in favor of the concrete. He looked back at Kamina, determined, if for that moment alone not to play along, and said only, “I’m Rossiu.”

Kamina, fearless, manly leader of whatever Team Gurren was, Simon, his soul brother, The Black Siblings, who hunted beastmen, and Rossiu. How ridiculous.

“Rossiu, huh?” He peered up when he heard his name; Kamina had cocked his eyebrow a long ways back and didn’t seem able to get it to come back down. “Quit lookin’ so sad and you’ll be almost as pretty as these sisters of yours!”

At that, the Kiyoh, Kinon, and Kiyal raised their voiced to pitchy little gasps and crowded back around Kamina, inadvertently pushing Simon out of the way in the process. He faltered, but managed to stay afoot, frowning.

Rossiu hadn’t noticed before how warm it was.

Kittan seemed to have forgotten about Rossiu as anything more than another thing about which to argue. Rossiu stood back, wringing his hands, while Kittan tried to shove through his sisters and scream, “He’s not my sist—brother—get offa my sisters!”

It wasn’t a particularly glamorous moment, Rossiu thought. He watched Kittan try to pull his sisters, one after another, away from Kamina, while they more or less ignored him; they were telling Kamina how strong he must have been, how brave, as if they or their brother had never done anything even remotely approaching what Kamina had. Rossiu couldn’t exactly blame Kittan for wanting them to leave him; they’d dissolved into this giggling hurricane no different from the girls in Shoubou fluttering all around Kittan. They hadn’t cared when boys looked at them before. Yet they fawned over Kamina. They told him how handsome he was, with his arms and his tattoos and his  _eyes,_  everything about his eyes.

Rossiu put his knuckle to his lips. He couldn’t make himself disagree with them. And Kamina had called  _him_ pretty? Kind of? He fell into a daze trying to decide what he made of it.

Everyone froze the moment a pinging shot rang out, whirring over their heads. It flew off into the sky, but the lot of them stayed put, absolutely paralyzed in position in the gunmen’s lap. This silent, terrified confusion got them all to turn their heads over in the direction from which it had fired, toward the ground.

Standing beside a willowy, turquoise-haired person—Rossiu, in any case, was hesitant to guess a gender at that point—a tall young woman aimed a gun whose length had to be at least equal to her height. The barrel smoked. She lowered the gun stood straight, glaring up through the little gap between Kiyal and Kiyoh at Kamina.

“Everyone, calm down,” she commanded. “Kamina, hands off. Are you just completely unable to not goad people? Honestly.”

He glared over at Kittan, eyelids twitching like the vicious turn their meeting had taken was his fault, somehow. “How long have you even been there, Yoko?”

“Long enough. Ron and I couldn’t hear you harassing Simon anymore but by the time we decided to check everything out, you were up here  _introducing_  yourself.” Yoko put a hand on her barely-covered hip—par for the course as it seemed for women not to dress with even the slightest hint of modesty up here—and looked up at Kittan. “Don’t worry about Kamina, he gets like this when he’s hungry.”

“I can hold out!” Kamina cried. “A real man’s gotta be able to fight on an empty stomach.”

“You’re cranky,” she said, stepping forward to climb up the gunmen. “Ornery.”

“Kiss my ass, Yoko.”

“Like a baby.” She stepped past him when a loud growl wound from his stomach, just to spite him.

Kittan’s sisters amped up their volume in Kamina’s direction to ignore Yoko as loudly as they could; Yoko strode on past as if they weren’t even there. She headed for Simon, whom she patted on the shoulder and guided over to Kittan and Rossiu.

She started talking to Kittan. Rossiu found himself fading out the moment he saw them lock eyes. It was pleasant enough, he supposed; Yoko gave herself a proper introduction, and Kittan did the same, cordial, if a bit stilted, and Yoko went on to apologize for Kamina again and asked Kittan if there was anything he or his sisters needed. “Everyone’s hungry, then,” he heard her say. His lips tightened when Kittan agreed. Rossiu didn’t want to hear a word of it.

He stood there, looking up in their direction, but casting his eyes off in the distance, up towards the sky, fixing on a wispy cloud dissolving its way past. There was some length, he supposed, that if his gaze traversed it, he’d outrun the range at which he’d have to hear Kittan force out this nervous chuckle whenever Yoko said something alluding to Kamina being an idiot. He wondered, if he went further, if he’d be able to block Yoko from his sight. His fingers twisted together. Why he couldn’t tolerate the sight or sound of it hung centimeters from the tip of his tongue.

Eventually he gave up, just as he, regrettably, happened to overhear Yoko mention that “Team Gurren” thing again. He looked away from the sky and happened to settle on Simon, who stood in front of him, half-turned around and watching Kamina absorb the sisters’ fawning like a scarlet-clad sandbag. He seemed to notice Rossiu’s split-second stare and looked back at him for a second, a second longer, and one last second.

His eyebrows knitted under his bangs, and his mouth wriggled until it formed a squiggly, part-smile. He exhaled, shoulders sinking. Rossiu, before realizing it, did the same.

The moment Yoko turned away from a still sort of slack-jawed Kittan, she placed a hand on Simon’s shoulder. She smiled down at him.

“Since our leader over there’s a little preoccupied, why don’t we go look for some food before he swipes you away again, huh, Simon?” she asked.

He let out a tight, but honest laugh, and answered, “Okay.” He was a bit out of breath still.

“R-Rossiu,” Kittan stuttered from behind them.

Rossiu looked over at him the second he heard that first rolling trip over his name.

“Go with ‘em,” he said. “I gotta—I gotta try and get  _them_ offa him. I mean—you don’t mind takin’ him, do you, Yoko?”

She shrugged. “Can he hunt?”

“He finds, like, fruit and stuff, it’s all he’ll eat. He’s good at it.”

Even for Kittan, it was ineloquent. Rossiu watched him, trying both not to do so and to decode whether he’d been complimented or placed on the level of livestock. Yoko put her other hand, the black fabric of her glove burning hot, on his shoulder. “I’ll take him,” she said.

He really wished she wouldn’t.

Kittan grinned at him. “Don’t worry about it. Quit lookin’ like that, Rossiu.”

He had no time to figure out how he looked before Yoko yanked him and Simon both and led them off the gunmen. Whoever looked back at Kamina first led the other two to do the same; Rossiu could have sworn he saw Yoko’s long red ponytail swish before his eyes before he turned his neck, but he remembered seeing it flash in front of Kamina clearing a path for himself between Kittan’s sisters to show the lot of them the cockpit of his gunmen. Yoko shook her head. “You boys—do me a favor and don’t ever end up like Kamina, okay?”

Simon laughed, honest but restrained as ever, and turned his attention elsewhere when a tiny pigmole raced up from the rocks nearby his side and perched itself on his shoulder; Rossiu scratched his head. He was missing something. He knew.

Until then, the tall, teal-haired androgyne who had first accompanied Yoko had remained silent. Here, though, as Yoko led Rossiu and Simon past, he—she?—caught Rossiu’s eye, and they eyed at one another.

“We’re awfully popular, aren’t we, Yoko?” he said. He. How strange, Rossiu thought. “But I guess two out of five isn’t bad.”

Yoko ignored it, whatever it meant. “You don’t need any help with Lagann, do you, Leeron?”

“Oh, no, I can handle it,” Leeron sighed, closing his eyes and shifting his weight on his heels.  _Heels._ Stranger and stranger. “You don’t need any help with the boys, do you?”

“I’ve got it, don’t worry. See you later.”

Rossiu spent half the walk over the valley trying to figure out what in the world a Lagann was before debating with himself how rude it would be to ask. Certainly he wouldn’t want to intrude on the business of a woman with a gun the size of her body and a man with a gunmen. He abandoned all thoughts of asking soon enough, though. If they wanted to tell him, they would. He kept looking back, trying to see Kittan and only coming up with Kamina; trying to look at Kamina and only catching sight of Kittan.

Everyone had fallen silent, too. Yoko had, at first, seemed intent on finding signs of edible life, and then perhaps trying to allow the two boys leeway to speak. Simon was conspicuous because of his silence; Rossiu, on occasion, glimpsed at him while he walked and saw his dark, beady eyes staring straight ahead, intent but distant. They gazed out forever. Rossiu had a sense that he’d seen it before, that sad, infinite scope, but he wondered after a moment if he’d just imagined the recognition.

And then from nowhere, Yoko said, “I think we’ve heard of you guys.”

It took Rossiu a second of analysis, and Yoko peering down at him from the corner of her eye, to answer. “Oh! You have?”

She nodded. “Sometimes back in Littner, people would talk about the Black Siblings. It was a while ago, I guess, at least before Team Gurren…Happened. We always wanted you guys to come pay us a visit, but it never happened. But I guess it is a pretty big world, huh? I could’ve sworn everybody always said there were only four of you, though.”

“O-oh,” he mumbled. He went over it all, and of course knew of the renown, but he shrunk briefly.

In an instant, though, he picked himself back up. He was a representative. A diplomat. So he spoke. “Well, technically there are. Kittan and Kiyoh and Kinon and Kiyal are all related. I’m not. I’ve only been with them a few weeks.”

“Really?” she spoke with the same soft, muted interest she’d given to Kittan, like she was impressed despite something or another. “I didn’t know they just let people in.”

“Well, they saved me,” he replied. He cringed back at the tone of his own voice; he hadn’t exactly raised it, but it grated on him, this little spark of confrontation. “A gunmen was attacking me, and they came up and rescued me from it. And I’ve been with them ever since.”

“You must be talented, then, right? If they let you join?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’m trying to learn…I don’t think I’m very good at it, but Kittan says I just need to practice. All the time.”

“I wonder why they kept you.”

Yoko had said it with such a disarming lack of intent to insult that Rossiu, still not wanting to hear his voice falter to that harsh twinge, dropped anything else he would have considered adding that very moment. Never once had he thought about it.

He remembered the siblings talking about how they brought people from one destroyed village to a new one, or stranded people on the surface to other villages. He’d been just as stranded as any of the others, but they took him in. He knew they sometimes kept people for a few days to allow them to heal, but Rossiu had only lost his breath and suffered a scratch or two. He wasn’t even good at fighting. But they kept him. He introduced himself as one of them, at Kittan’s insistence.

They reached the bottom of a ledge. Yoko giggled. “Maybe you and Kittan are soul brothers. What do you think, Simon?”

When Rossiu looked over, she was just moving her hand away from Simon, whose overgrown indigo hair shook as he turned away from gazing behind him. The pigmole, still sitting on his shoulder, looked over as well and let out an inquisitive little noise. He peered around her at Rossiu, the little conical golden bauble on the end of his necklace glinting as he moved, and smiled. “O-oh! Maybe!”

Soul brothers.

Lagann.

Team Gurren.

Tact be damned, the curiosity ate at Rossiu like acid through steel. He watched the both of them begin to scale the ledge, and, biting his lip, followed. “U-um, I beg your pardon—soul brothers? I keep hearing that.”

“That’s what me and Kamina are,” Simon said, pride swirling together with this hint of something that made his voice wobble a bit. “He has me call him Bro, so I…W-we’re not related, we’re just…Soul brothers. Best friends. More than that…” he shrugged. “He can explain it better than I can.”

All the running around Rossiu had had to do as of late still didn’t prepare him for the steepness of this ledge. He trudged up, lagging a great ways behind them. “Have you known him a long time?”

Simon nodded. He had, Rossiu noticed, a voice as distant as his gaze. It wafted onto the breeze and floated with it, going wherever it went, in this dreamy reverence. If he talked about Kamina, it seemed, he could talk about anything from there. “Ever since I was really little, back when we lived in Jiiha Village. He got in trouble a lot, and sometimes I got in trouble with him, but we’re best friends. I guess that’s how it works. He let me be in Team Gurren and everything.”

Yoko and Simon reached the top of the ledge long before Rossiu. There, a largish watering hole sat waiting for them, silent and possibly empty.

“What is Team Gurren?” he asked. He all but cringed back, waiting for someone to tell him how stupid he was for not knowing, but no such words ever came.

“Us, I guess,” Simon said. “In Jiiha, we were kind of…Kind of a gang, but now I guess it’s me and Kamina and Yoko and Leeron. Bro wants us to take back the surface.”

Yoko stepped out of the way to let the boys stand side by side. “Not too different from what you guys want, huh?”

Rossiu only shrugged.

“I dunno what the name means,” Simon added. “He comes up with names all the time, just off the top of his head. They just work. Gurren’s his gunmen. He named mine Lagann.”

Rossiu blinked.

Kamina, of course, he could see piloting a gunmen. Kamina was, at once, a spectacle and a debacle, the best of a gunmen and the worst of a beastman combined but human, somehow. But Simon, this pale, scrawny little boy whose vision and voice existed miles apart from his body, who drowned in his clothing, had a pet pigmole, and wore what Rossiu now identified as a tiny drill as jewelry, just didn’t compute. Simon didn’t seem to notice him goggling at him, trying to add it up; rather, his distant gaze settled once again back on Kamina, far down the path, sad but proud.

Yoko, however, told the two of them to go off and forage, while she would perch on a rock and wait for whatever came by. Simon seemed to trust her not to mistake them for something else, and somehow, Rossiu was inclined to trust him, in turn. He led the way, shoulders stiff and in an aimless path, on guard for any vegetation he recognized, while Simon’s pigmole darted around on the ground by their feet. Down below, he could still hear the echoes of the two older boys, though any individual words were muffled and submerged by the distance. He heard only remnants.

Rossiu moved to pluck a fat, yellow-green fruit half the size of his face from a bush. In his head, he still tried to place Simon into the cockpit of a gunmen and, focusing on placing the fragile, thin-skinned fruit into the crook of his other arm, asked, “How did you two get gunmen?”

Sidling up beside him, Simon followed his lead and reached out for a second fruit. Rossiu didn’t say a word until he was done.

Simon and Kamina were from a village called Jiiha. Simon was a digger. While on duty, he found the Core Drill first, the necklace he wore and which he brandished to Rossiu proudly. Not long after, he found Lagann, this comparatively dwarfish gunmen without a pilot, buried in the rock. Some gunmen crashed through Jiiha’s ceiling, Yoko in tow, and Simon led Kamina and Yoko over to Lagann, where he realized he could pilot it. “I just got in and I just…Knew what to do,” he said. Kamina wouldn’t let them go back underground. Simon, he had been saying for years, had the ‘drill that would pierce the heavens.’ It made no sense and perfect sense. Yoko took them to her village on the surface, Littner, where Kamina decided he would steal a gunmen for himself. “He got the beastman out and just got in, and he just did it,” Simon said.

Gurren and Lagann could combine.

Some beastman with a two-headed, they thought, gunmen attacked. Kamina just thought it would work. And it did. They stole one of the heads of the other gunmen—actually just a helmet—and Kamina called their combined mech Gurren Lagann. Not as terrific as the act that led to its birth, but nevertheless.

Leeron, who it turned out, was some kind of mechanical genius, found information in Gurren’s data banks that tracked the location of what appeared to be the headquarters of the beastmen, and Team Gurren had set out to try to find it, take them all out, and reclaim the surface.

For humanity.

Thankfully, Simon sputtering and backtracking his way through the whole story gave Rossiu more than enough time to ponder over everything while he collected as much vegetation as he could. By the time Simon finished, Yoko had tracked down a crocrabbit big enough for everyone, and the three of them made their way back to the valley.

Any lingering questions about the divinity of the gunmen evaporated. If the things really were holy, and abided by the laws they’d supposedly set in place back in Adai, a gang leader, a thief, a braggart like Kamina, no matter how charismatic and handsome and commanding he was, would never seize control of one. When he and Simon and Yoko joined back up with everyone else, he first noticed Kittan, seated on the ground beside his nakibashiri, counting his supply of bombs. Nearby, the girls tried to hold a blanket around the perimeter of a very shoddy fire pit to keep the breeze away while they chatted at a small distance with Kamina.

Rossiu just watched Kamina. He sat with his back against Gurren’s foot, laughter reverberating off rocks and metal. As they got closer, Rossiu could hear that he and Kiyal were discussing the specifics of some kind of potential mech for her. She wanted something versatile, “So I can take out any beastman I see no matter what.” Kamina told her, “You gotta find one that you like how it looks! Else it ain’t really yours.

“And you gotta have fighting spirit,” he added. “You know what that is, right?”

“’Course I do!” she squealed, sunlight hitting the white enamel of her sharp little incisor. “Can’t be in a Black Sibling if you don’t got fighting spirit! Right, bro?”

She looked over at Kittan, who dropped a handful of black spheres into the nearest saddlebag. “Don’t even, Kiyal! I ain’t lettin’ you try to take one of those things!”

She glared at him, but Kamina, a second later and loudly feigning a whisper, told her, “You wanna join Team Gurren, Kiyal? I’ll let you!”

Kiyal swelled up, brimming with joy, every second bringing her closer and closer to popping like a balloon. When Kiyal turned around to stick her tongue out at her brother, Kamina happened to swing his head over. He and Rossiu exchanged a look.

“Whatcha got there, Forehead?” he asked, and barked a loud, “Mind your business,” at Kittan when he yelled at him not to call him that.

Suddenly very aware of the weight in his arms and almost worried for a second that he’d lose his grip, Rossiu headed over to Kamina while Yoko and Simon brought the rest of the food to the girls.

Kamina had taken his sunglasses off. He stayed seated and grinned up at Rossiu, all toothy and smug. Rossiu wished he’d never heard the girls. When had he ever considered someone attractive? Someone so indulgent, too, no less. He thought his mother was pretty, but that was his mother; he’d had days where he found himself acceptable to leave his sleeping quarters, decent-looking, passable. He couldn’t remember looking at anybody in Adai and enjoying it beyond the typical parameters of seeing another person. He looked over at Kittan, who looked back at him, over his shoulder, still rifling through a saddlebag.

Looking away, he leaned forward, and Kamina took a fruit from his arms. “Never seen one of these before.”

“They’re pretty good,” he answered, forcing the words out.

Kamina tossed it back and forth between his hands, and each little motion dented the skin a bit. “You been lookin’ at me funny, Forehead.”

Silent, Rossiu only refrained from dropping all the fruits he’d gathered by stiffening his entire body.

“Dunno what it is,” he added, leaning in just an inch closer. “I kinda like it. I  _wanna_  like it. You’re tryin’ to act like you don’t got as much spirit as you do. I can see it. So brighten up. I know this place is shit, but as long as Team Gurren’s around, it’s only gonna get better. Let it out.”

Rossiu, at a loss for the trillionth time, blinked, and Kamina practically bit the fruit in half.

Having finished helping Yoko and the girls lower the crocrabbit down onto a second blanket, Simon dashed over to Kamina’s side and offered him another fruit, which Kamina gladly took. Still dazed, Rossiu left them be and set his fruits on the blanket in the shadow of the crocrabbit, where they rolled about and mixed with the ones Simon had gathered in his jacket.

 _Brighten up._ He strolled over to Kittan, who fixed the tie on one saddlebag and moved on to the next, searching through it and counting its contents.

“What’d he want?” Kittan asked.

Rossiu stood still. “He said I’m not letting my fighting spirit out.”

“I been tellin’ you.”

Kittan fell silent after that, and Rossiu followed suit. The girls were all tittering about behind them, and Yoko sort of muttered this or that in the midst of them. Leeron had disappeared.

Every time Rossiu heard Kamina laugh way over there, Simon giggling by his side, he heard him say it again.  _Let it out._ His fighting spirit. What exactly was fighting spirit, anyway? A desire to fight, he supposed. A yearning. A need. But Rossiu…

…Rossiu tried to brighten up. Kittan scowled in silence beside him. He looked down at his boots; the hole in the toe kept growing, all covered in shadow.

“Kittan?” he asked.

He didn’t take his face out of the bag. “Yeah?”

“Are we…” he had no right to stop now that he’d started. “…Are we soul brothers?”

A darker, wider shadow descended upon all of them. Rising up from beyond the ledge Rossiu, Simon, and Yoko had climbed earlier, like a mountain from the ancient lithospheric depths, was that same sixteen-faced gunmen from all those other times. In the dizziness of everything since an hour before, Rossiu had almost forgotten about it.

Without a word, Kiyoh, Kinon, and Kiyal leapt away from the fire pit and mounted their respective nakibashiri. Kamina tossed the rest of whosever fruit he had and climbed back into Gurren. Leeron shot up from behind a pile of rocks several yards away and flagged Simon over. Yoko shouldered her gun and fired a number of rounds at it. Kittan spun half around to watch her. Rossiu stared straight into the thick white fur of the nakibashiri and hopped on. If he could whistle, he would have run. It made no sense. He made no sense. He clung to its tail and kept his head down until he felt Kittan hop on and grab him with one hand while he whistled. The nakibashiri took off, zooming off to catch up with the sisters, singing out their battle cry.

Behind them, Gurren creaked to its feet. Shouting Simon’s name, Kamina’s voice roared through a metallic filter over them. Gurren, it seemed, needed only for Kamina to be in shape in order to work.

“Simon!” he cried again. “Combine!”

With a ball of flammable water in his hand and ducking to avoid both the ones Kittan and his sisters hurled over his head in addition to the missiles the gunmen shot out, breaking its face-dotted arms into sections, Rossiu could only barely turn and peer over his shoulder for a second. Some tiny object whirred up Gurren’s side before it knocked it back to the ground. Rossiu turned back and steered the nakibashiri to the left.

Another sly little look gave Rossiu a view of what he knew had to be Lagann, red and not much bigger than Simon himself, literally just a face with limbs. Gurren charged forth and Lagann ran after it, bounding over the rocks. Simon was calling something out and Kamina was shouting something back at him, all indecipherable.

Except, “Combine.” Every time Kamina told Simon to combine, Lagann would dart up Gurren like a gecko up a tree and Gurren would knock it right back down to the ground.

It made no sense. And Kittan, throwing hand free, grabbed Rossiu’s shoulder and leaned in close to his ear, voice wavering just a bit. “Keep your eyes on the damn running!”

He picked himself back up, perking himself straight. He’d somehow steered them a depression in the land, and the girls were nowhere to be seen.

“What happened?” he cried.

Kittan reached down and pulled two more bombs from a saddlebag, handing one to Rossiu. “You’re asking me? You gotta pay attention to this shit! Doesn’t matter how cool Gurren is!”

He shut up when Rossiu looked back at him. Out of the duty of it, Rossiu chucked his ball of water with a weak overhand toss at the gunmen, and it detonated somewhere by its shin. Still, as it had done so many times before, the gunmen broke apart, and the individual little component faces that made up its limbs orbited around the body in a blur. Immediately afterward, he turned back to Kittan, who shoved another into his hand. “Were you—”

“Throw that shit!”

So he threw. Now combined again, the sixteen-headed gunmen, though, seemed infinitely more focused on Gurren than either Lagann or any of the others attacking it from the ground below. No matter how many times Rossiu or Kittan chucked their bombs at it, it never even looked their way.

Kamina called Simon a dumbass just after the gunmen hit Gurren with a missile. He still wouldn’t allow the combination.

Rossiu still found no sign of the sisters, even after they’d swung back into the general area of the camp. As if Rossiu’s waist were a rein, Kittan held onto him as tightly as he could with just one hand. He steered the nakibashiri through Gurren’s legs as it rose up again and up the ledge, where Yoko, from absolutely nowhere, landed on the cramped back of the nakibashiri right behind Kittan, who let go. Rossiu nearly dropped his bomb; it fumbled from his hand as he wound his arm back to toss it, and it flew with all the grace of the heavy orb of sloshing liquid it was until it exploded on the sharp edge of the cliff. Rossiu ducked forward.

They were talking again, shouting to hear one another over the explosions and the tinny chuckling and Simon yelling something at Kamina like he had an answer. Yoko told Kittan to throw his flammable water, and he did, and she shot and hit it in mid-air; it blew up right on the side of the other gunmen and gave Kamina enough time to finish getting Gurren to its feet.

They did it again and again, one round after another, like Rossiu wasn’t even on the back of the animal, steering it. He peeked up over the fur and saw the sun setting far away, through the little gaps behind the silhouettes of Gurren and the sixteen-faced gunmen, pulling apart once again only to reconfigure itself. He focused, strained to watch it, until his eyes hurt from the blazing orange poking around the darkening solid figures, and he couldn’t hear Kittan and Yoko working together.

“That’s it!” Kamina hollered.

Lagann leapt from the ground straight up into the air, far above the tops of both Gurren and the other gunmen. Its legs retreated into its body only to be replaced by a drill that cut through the air and whirred its way into the empty space between Gurren’s shoulders.

The gunmen with the sixteen faces just froze. Whatever Gurren and Lagann did, a moment later, they were no longer individual components; just as Simon had said, they’d combined. Simon and Kamina’s voices soared from inside, announcing it all, and Gurren Lagann stood shoving its upper head, Lagann in that ornate helmet, into the main element of the other gunmen.

“Combining ain’t like an affair, where you come and go whenever you want!” Kamina roared. “You ain’t got a true bond! Where’s your principles?”

The gunmen divided and reformed again, and the audacity did not for a second go unnoticed. Rossiu, even as his eyes just skimmed the tips of the nakibashiri’s fur, traveling at nigh on top speed and with pings soaring overhead to give way to explosions in the distance, he heard it all. That monogamous devotion to one another; going out of their way to make it happen properly. He knew principles. He knew devotion.

_Let it out._

He honestly didn’t know what he did next. He reached into the closest saddlebag he could find, pulled out two bombs, and, struggling to keep them both in his hand, fixed his eyes on the sixteen-headed gunmen’s shoulder. He cried out Kittan’s name. He wouldn’t even have guessed Kittan had heard him if he didn’t, that very instant, feel his hand on his hip. Rossiu didn’t say a word. He threw the orb of water watched it soar in a far more graceful arc alongside the one Kittan threw. They hit the gunmen’s shoulder at the same moment.

When the smoke cleared, two of the four components that had composed its arm lay on the ground in ruins. Gurren Lagann had sent two long, thin drills—that Rossiu swore hadn’t been there a moment ago—through the other arm, the main head at the center, and the two other components nearest them, skewering the whole thing. Gurren Lagann retracted its drills, and the other gunmen exploded.

Whatever unthinking thing Rossiu had done, whatever impulsive non-strategy he and Kittan had pulled off, the familiarity of it made him shiver. Hadn’t he done this before? Something of the sort? Regardless, he wouldn’t sit and pretend this, in particular, was anything even remotely close to what Kamina and Simon had done, but he did something, and hadn’t, for a second, planned it. He guided the nakibashiri to skid to a halt. Kittan leapt off, and Yoko slid down the side of it. Panting, astonished, Rossiu eased his way off.

Kittan was scanning the horizon, the land all around, anywhere he could see. They still hadn’t found his sisters. Standing a few feet behind him, Yoko tried to catch his attention, but he didn’t answer.

Quietly, Rossiu strode up to his side. Kiyoh. Kinon. Kiyal. They couldn’t be dead. It was far too rash to assume. In the calamity of everything, they’d rushed ahead, and, naturally, they’d gotten separated. Before he even noticed Kittan even realizing he was there, before he could put his hand on his and tell him that the girls’ safety was all that made sense, Kittan threw his arm around his shoulders and yanked him, shoved him right into his side. He was shaking. Rossiu held on, tightly as he could.

“Interesting, aren’t they? Kamina and Simon.”

When Kittan turned around, he pulled Rossiu with him. Yoko had shied off to the side to make room for all three of Kittan’s sisters, covered in dust and more than a little bloody, but not altogether destroyed. Kiyoh smiled over at Kittan and Rossiu.

“Not as interesting as you two,” she added.

“We wouldn’t die that easily,” Kinon said.

Rossiu looked up at him, and as if he and Kiyal noticed it at once, she chuckled. “Don’t cry, bro, come on. It’ll take a whole lot more than rocks for me, you know that. I got too much fighting spirit!”

“Don’t fuckin’ scare me like that!” Kittan sobbed. He lifted his arm to wipe his eyes.

But Rossiu stood on his toes, reached up as high as he could, and wiped them for him. Kittan just stopped. The girls, all giggling once again, took the chance to speed off toward Gurren Lagann. Slowly, Yoko followed them, glancing back once over her shoulder with a smile. Alone, the two of them looked at one another for a long time.

“You’re not going to stop them?” Rossiu asked.

“You ain’t goin’ over there?” Kittan asked.

They paused again.

“We probably both oughta. And, uh,” Kittan finished wiping his eye. He shrugged. “I dunno if we’re soul brothers. We’re better than that.”

It was a strange thing not to care that he didn’t know how to respond. Rossiu just smiled and let Kittan lift him up onto his back, and they headed over to Gurren Lagann, to Yoko, to the girls, and, hopefully, some rest. Fighting spirit was exhausting.


	8. 8

After a halfway decent and long overdue dinner, at Yoko’s insistence, Team Gurren and the Black Siblings decided to share the parched little valley in which they’d met to settle down for the night. The only objection came, briefly, from Kittan, who did nothing but snarl under his breath at Kamina, whose goading only ramped up when the sisters began orbiting him once again as soon as he’d hopped out of Gurren Lagann. Rossiu tried, at first, to lead him away, but Kittan turned and went right back to tending to the nakibashiri. He could take a hint. Rossiu let him be. He’d done it before and it was nothing personal; not against Rossiu, anyway.

Brilliant as the sunset had been, it faded just as quickly. In the dark, everyone—save Leeron, who darted around Gurren to repair it as he seemed to have done thousands upon thousands of times before—hung around the fire. Kiyoh and Kinon and Kiyal couldn’t seem to get enough of Kamina, though they spoke pleasantly enough to Yoko by then, if from a distance. Kittan kept to himself. Simon had wandered away from Kamina and ended up inside Lagann, his pigmole, Boota hitching a ride on his shoulder.

And Rossiu sat against a rock, bracing himself just slightly against the breeze.

He leaned his head back and stared up at the stars, now glittering in the blue-black sky. All the chatter and the commotion faded into just sounds. He closed his eyes, smiling to himself. Even when he could hear Yoko and Kamina arguing—again—he could relax.

But when he thought about Kittan, some feet behind him, in all likelihood brushing one of the nakibashiri probably too forcefully, his eyes opened again. He turned around and sat up straight to peek over the rock.

There Kittan was, hunched over, doing just that. The girls had already set the blankets up for the five of them; Rossiu wondered if Kittan would just head to bed soon. He’d been bickering with Kamina all day, competing with him as if he had any reason in the world to, and after a point, even Rossiu couldn’t even get him to calm down. But he supposed sometimes a person just needed alone time. He sighed.

In Adai, he’d gotten plenty of time to himself. The Father assigned him a few hours a day to retreat to his room and pray, or just think and reflect on the rules set in motion by the Face-God, and how they applied to daily life. He went over stories the Father read for him from the scriptures. Often he ended up thinking more about how desperately he wanted to pass each test as quickly as he could to get the blessing to learn how to read. He’d looked into the Holy Book every day and saw the little glyphs on each page, wedges and scribbles and dots, and he wondered what each of them meant. Alone, Rossiu had desires. Surrounded by others, he was to force them back down inside. Greed and impatience were unbecoming of a priest-in-training. Gladly, he took to his training and kept his eyes on the future reward for abstaining. The long term meant he would have earned it. Every time he was alone, though, he told himself, under his breath, not to want. Just wait. Just wait.

Something tickled his cheek. He blinked, and when he turned, shaking, Boota had hopped up onto the rock beside him. The pigmole stuck his tongue out and wiped it up Rossiu’s face, and he winced a little, but with a smile, he wiped it away.

Off to the side, behind Boota, Simon steered Lagann into view. Boota turned and bounced across the rocks over to him and jumped right back onto Simon’s shoulder. Simon greeted him with a scratch that he leaned into.

“Hi, Rossiu,” he said. “U-um, s-sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.” He straightened up and propped himself up against the rocks.

He hadn’t really gotten a proper view of Lagann yet. When they fought, he’d seen it as a blur, this speck bounding across the land and up and onto Gurren, and Leeron had stolen it away to patch it up while everyone else set up camp. Now, though, it was only a few feet from him, its metal shining against the firelight.

Rossiu was transfixed, again, and he could feel it. Small as Lagann was, and mobile, and with limbs, when he looked into the blank, gray face that made up its body, it could have been the child of the Face-God. He remembered noting to himself once that it seemed the Face-God’s eyes had once been much brighter, as if they’d had color long, long ago, and now, under the dim candlelight that kept Adai’s corridors in view, they were only a shade lighter than the stone surrounding them, covered in a film like chipped paint. Lagann’s eyes were bright yellow, glowing, and wide open. They had the same chiseled sort of features, a bit on the unnatural side, but not entirely frightening. Just stern. Watchful.

Inside the tiny mecha, Simon scratched at his elbow and watched Rossiu drift back into attentiveness. He gave him a half-smile. “D-do you, um…Wanna come in?”

“Wh—” Rossiu was sure there wasn’t room for him before he realized he’d been  _invited inside a gunmen_. “I-in Lagann?”

“Yeah! I can show you how it works, if you want. I mean,” he sort of shook his head a bit, bobbing it around to look at this or that. “I don’t really know how it works. But I can show you what it looks like.”

“I—Alright.”

He stood up and approached Lagann with all the speed and softness he’d allot to tracking a bird. Quiet so he wouldn’t startle it; slow so he wouldn’t give it reason to fear. Inside a gunmen. When he reached it, he held his hand out and brushed his finger along the rim, just like wiping dust from a shelf.

It almost surprised him that it didn’t feel any different from regular metal. He looked up at Simon, who was examining him, head tilted. Rossiu scratched at the back of his neck. Maybe it was a bit embarrassing to study it this intently, but…He forced a smile.

“U-um. I-I’ve never been this close to one before,” he said. “I mean. I never thought I’ve been, anyway.”

Simon had, it seemed a bit before, started to move to give Rossiu some room to climb in. Now, though, he sat cramped at the far corner of the interior, completely puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked.

So Rossiu told him about the Face-God. It spilled out of him almost too easily. Simon fell as quiet as Rossiu had when he’d told him about Jiiha Village and Team Gurren.

“Well,” Simon answered, smiling weakly once Rossiu had finished. “Lagann’s not a god. Just a really good robot. Come in, let me show you something.”

He hadn’t even questioned it. Again and again, he could find no reason not to trust Simon. But with still more than a drawn-out trace of apprehension, Rossiu climbed into Lagann. It was definitely cramped inside; Simon had made as much room as he could for him and their shoulders still knocked together as they sat side-by-side.

“Look,” Simon said.

The ‘something’ he’d wanted to show him turned out to be the Core Drill. Simon gave it a twist and pulled it free from a little hole in the middle of a circle with a swirling, green display. Lagann settled underneath them like it had let out a sigh. Rossiu winced and held onto the side. Simon told Rossiu to look again, and he put the drill back inside, twisted it counterclockwise, and the green swirl zipped back onto the display. Thankfully, Rossiu hadn’t let go, but he yelped again when Lagann picked itself back up.

“See?” Simon asked. “This is how it goes.”

He bristled. Mesmerized into a stupor by the quietly humming display, Rossiu would not, for the life of him, let go. “How—how does it do that?”

Then it started to walk. It wasn’t a terribly clunky ride at all, he realized after a moment, but his stomach had leapt so high in his chest that he still couldn’t ease his grip even after they’d cleared a solid distance from the camp.

Simon had fallen quiet again. Rossiu peered over at him, and only then did he notice Simon’s hand on some kind of control lever down below. He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just does. Bro says it’s fighting spirit. I think Leeron sorta thinks so, too, but I dunno what…I dunno.”

“But you’re not fighting right now,” Rossiu said. “What does Kamina even mean by that?”

Simon shrugged again. “I dunno, it’s like…I just know it when I feel it. B-but I don’t always feel it. When Bro’s around, I feel it. He’s got nothing but fighting spirit.”

He steered Lagann halfway around, and together, they could see the rest of the group. Everyone had started to break away, and Kiyoh was hovering around the fire as if delaying when she’d have to put it out. Kittan stayed in place with the nakibashiri. Kamina was either laughing with Kinon or Kiyal or at Yoko.

And Simon, with his distant gaze, was looking right at him.

“He does seem like it, doesn’t he?” Rossiu asked.

“He’s always been that way,” he said, hanging his head. Boota jumped down into his lap. “I mean…His dad took him to the surface when he was really little, but he didn’t go with him. After that, all he ever wanted to do is come back up.”

He sort of trailed, and Rossiu picked it back up. “What happened to his father?”

Simon took a very long time to answer, and when he did, his voice shook. “He died.”

Rossiu dropped his head. The burial prayer hummed at the back of his head. He wondered what Kamina must have pictured, if he himself always remembered his mother turning back to look at him before she ascended the stairs out of Adai; Kamina had been given the choice, at least, to go. Had he not felt blessed for the opportunity?

“We found his body after Kamina hijacked Gurren,” Simon continued. “We buried him, and Bro took his cape. He hasn’t really said much about it ever since then.”

“He must be sad.”

“He was,” Simon looked back over at Kamina, all the way across the land. Kiyoh had put the fire out. “Of course he was, I mean—but now it’s just…I don’t think he’s sad. He’s just…I dunno. I dunno.”

He knew, Rossiu thought. Were he a wordsmith like Kamina himself, he’d be able to get it out.

Simon, though, saw fit to change the subject. “Nobody underground ever believed him that the surface even existed. I mean, I did, but it made sense. I always believed in him. He’s—he believes in me, for some reason, but I believe in him. And if he believes in me, I feel better. I don’t really believe in myself otherwise.”

Rossiu couldn’t really make out the shapes of the others anymore. He focused instead on Simon, illuminated all green from the display.

“I guess it’s…I mean, you know how I feel, right?” Simon looked back at him, wearing his weak little smile again. “You and Kittan have the same thing going on, don’t you?”

What in the world? Rossiu edged back. “I beg your pardon?”

“W-well, ‘cause I thought you mighta…I dunno, maybe I was wrong,” he let his face fall into his hand.

Silent, Rossiu watched him.

“I-I dunno,” Simon muttered. “I just…When Yoko was talking to Kittan earlier, I thought you sorta…I thought it was the same as how Kittan’s sisters were all on Kamina. Y’know.”

He did not. He swore he didn’t. “I don’t…Um.”

Simon’s mouth fidgeted, and he looked all around, down, and Boota looked up at him, tilting. When he looked at Boota, he murmured, “Jealous.”

Rossiu could have thrown up when he heard it. Yes. That was what it was. He hid his face in his hands and remembered it, looking at them, trying not to, trying to hear and see anything but the two of them. Disgraceful. He hadn’t wanted Yoko to talk to Kittan. It was envy. Exactly. But he said nothing.

“Th-thought you mighta had sort of…” Simon wasn’t even looking at him. “…Sort of a crush on him.”

The people of the surface, it seemed, lived to bewilder him. “I…Pardon?”

“’Cause that’s how—”

“What is a crush?”

Silence. Peeking through his fingers, Rossiu saw Simon wheel his face back around to him. Even through the bright green tint, he could make out a blush on his cheeks.

“U-um, it…” Simon wore this frantic look like he’d never met someone who didn’t know what it was in his life. He bounced his foot against Lagann’s floor, still mute, shaking his head like he’d back out and tell him to drop it any minute, but he couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, so Rossiu waited.

But after a minute, still looking far away from Rossiu, he told him. “I-It’s…You just…Really, really like someone. You like how they look and how they act, or that type of stuff. I dunno, usually it’s just something you can’t even figure out. You just like them. A-and you wanna… _Be_ with them, y’know? Like…Y’know, it’s sorta like love, I guess. People get crushes on people, and then they usually…Love them, I dunno. You didn’t have any crushes on anyone in your village?”

Taking his hands away, he shook his head. He didn’t need to remind himself that he had never found anyone attractive back home. Not a single crush. Unheard of. “No. I…People just…In Adai, there just aren’t a whole lot of people. They just pair up, and they’re in love, and then they get married and have babies. There weren’t even a whole lot of kids my age, or anything, all…All older people and babies, mostly.”

“Oh…” Simon drifted away. “S-so was it all…Just…Guys marrying girls?”

Why it mattered, Rossiu didn’t know, but he nodded all the same. “Everything I saw was, anyway. Why?”

Simon just said, “Nothing.”

They meandered around for a minute more, no sound but Lagann’s steps and Boota’s peppy little pigmole cooing as he darted back up Simon’s shoulder. “W-we should get back,” Simon said.

“Alright.”

The light from Lagann’s eyes lit the way. Rossiu gazed out toward the camp, where Yoko and Leeron had already stuffed themselves into a tent near Gurren’s feet, and where Kittan and his sisters had darted out of sight to settle down in their area on the other side of a cluster of boulders to Gurren’s right.

He wondered why it would matter if it was only men marrying women in Adai. Of course it must have had something to do with Simon and Kamina both being boys, and Rossiu, himself, had never seen or heard of anything of the sort before. Simon’s crush made sense, though, and was perfectly likely, given all possibilities. Every person, he knew, had the capacity to love unconditionally. But Rossiu wouldn’t press the matter; Simon didn’t seem like much for conversation anymore.

And he wondered why Simon had thought he felt the same way about Kittan. He considered it, and left it, for the time being, at just that. They arrived at the camp, where Kamina crawled out from Yoko and Leeron’s tent.

“Um, Simon,” Rossiu said. “I’d like to…Talk to Kamina, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh,” he only picked his head up when Rossiu shambled out of Lagann, as careful as if the mech were made of glass. “Yeah, go for it. I’m just sleeping in here, anyway.”

“O-okay. Goodnight, then,” he paused and stepped a ways out of the way to watch Kamina step through the shadows over to Simon and throw his arm around him.

Simon swelled again just as he’d done when Kamina had introduced himself earlier. Kamina gave him one last pat on the back and told him goodnight. Simon closed the latch on Lagann and hid under a screen like a brain.

Kamina didn’t even see Rossiu. He strode over to Gurren and started to climb; apparently he was going to sleep in his mech, as well. Rossiu watched from below, and told himself he was just going to tell him he was sorry about his father. Common courtesy, quick and done. He stepped forward.

“Mr. Kamina?”

Kamina looked down at him, hanging apelike by one hand from Gurren’s tooth in mid-climb. He smirked. “Ahh, Forehead! How’s it goin’?”

Rossiu ignored it. “I-I, um…You’re going to bed?”

“I was gonna,” he said. “You need something?”

The longer he looked up at Kamina looking back down at him, he shivered. He held onto his arms, bracing again. “I just…Wanted to talk to you. It won’t take long.”

Kamina seemed to consider it briefly before letting go. He dropped to the ground, his cape billowing down with him like a parachute. Sandals clicking and flapping against the soles of his feet, he made his way over to Rossiu.

Contact again. The color of Kamina’s eyes, that deep scarlet that had blazed so brightly in the light before, even under his sunglasses, couldn’t have been even the slightest tint different from the slick metal covering Gurren. In the daytime, Rossiu had thought it wasn’t just the sun illuminating them; now, in the night, he had all but proven himself completely positive. They glowed like a pair of tiny moons. The girls were absolutely right. Kamina was beautiful, and Rossiu sunk away against the thought, huddling into himself. He didn’t want to look at him. It would be an utter lack of discipline to keep doing so.

“You don’t gotta call me ‘Mr.,’ y’know,” Kamina asked, grinning. He’d watched Rossiu ogle at him the entire time, and watched him, all the same, when he looked away. “What’s up, Forehead?”

“I just…”

It had seemed so much easier when he’d first gotten the idea. Rossiu had planned the conversation, something simple and mature and courteous and then he’d be on with it; they’d both be on with it. But Kamina stood before him, this tall, radiant man, this statue with the brilliant plumage, strong and unwavering and calling him ‘Forehead’ the whole time. In some corridor in the back of his head he told himself to have expected this; this was Kamina, who burst through the ceiling of Jiiha Village, who stormed the surface to take out every beastman he saw, who surrendered for no one, whose name parents used to make their children behave, the paragon of masculinity, Team Gurren’s leader. The man for whom Simon had feelings, and rightfully so. Kamina wouldn’t change just because Rossiu wanted a kind word with him. He shook.

Part of him wanted to reach out and just brush a finger against Kamina’s skin to make sure he was real and not some kind of artificial construct, or a mirage, or, worst of all, if he really was merely human. But Rossiu hadn’t earned it. He couldn’t pop that bubble. It had to drift upward, floating out of Rossiu’s sight, out of the ground’s sight, until it burst high above, somewhere among the clouds where it belonged.

Rossiu cleared his throat. He focused on Kamina’s collar bone; high enough. “…Um. Simon told me about your father.”

Kamina stood still for a moment. “What’d he say?”

“That he brought you to the surface when you were little,” he answered. “And how you wanted to come up here because of him. And how you’re wearing his cape.”

“Yeah,” was all he said.

It was almost a worst-case scenario, how little Kamina had to add. Perhaps, Rossiu thought, he’d simply taken him off-guard, but it didn’t make any sense. He admitted to himself, vaguely, that he hadn’t exactly planned what Kamina would say; but with the way he’d spoken all day, so triumphantly, and with such volume and flair, that he’d say a lot.

He hadn’t even offered those condolences yet, anyway. Rossiu took a breath; keep going. “M-my…My mother came to the surface as well.”

Not quite indignant, but certainly with a hint of a childish kind of astonishment, Kamina tensed back. “And you didn’t go with her?”

“I was seven. I couldn’t go.” Rossiu shifted back when Kamina moved, trying to stay focused on his shoulder, or his hair, or something that was close enough to his face without being it.

“What’d you do, then? Did she try to bring you with her?”

He shook his head. “She couldn’t. I, um…In my village, we could only support fifty people at a time. Anytime there was a birth, we drew sticks to send someone to the surface. She was chosen, so she went to the surface.” Kamina’s head bobbed back at that, sort of beginning to open his mouth to say something, when Rossiu quickly added, “I was expelled that way, too.”

“Why the hell would they do something like that?” Kamina asked. “Didn’t they know what a shitfest it is up here?”

“Of course not,” Rossiu replied. “But our village had almost nothing. When the Father took over, he…He made it better. It was how we lived.”

“The Father? Your father? He sent your mom up here?”

He remembered Kittan thinking the same thing. “No. He was our head priest.”

Kamina, it turned out, didn’t even know what a priest was. Pricking himself up, Rossiu told him about the religion, and the Face-God, and how it was an honorable, holy thing to be chosen by Him to go to the heavens on the surface. All the while, Kamina listened, reeling to hold himself back from making a snide remark or pounce like a lion on something he could nitpick as an injustice.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Rossiu asked, at last, shooting his eyes up into Kamina’s. He’d grown hot just from talking, and he’d watched the whole time as Kamina tried to interject. “To pierce the ceiling and make it to heaven? That’s what Simon told me.”

He regretted it immediately.

“It ain’t anything like that. The surface ain’t heaven. There ain’t even  _a_ heaven,” Kamina said.

Something in Rossiu’s stomach dropped. If he could just turn his feet and leave, he would at least give it a try, but even the hypothetical model failed him. He couldn’t move and didn’t want to and didn’t know why. “I know it isn’t.”

“The heavens are way up there,” Kamina said, and he pointed high up into the air, towards the thick band of swirling, heavily concentrated stars shooting down the length of the sky like a spine. “The heavens are higher than you can even think of. Your brain can’t figure it out, and it doesn’t even matter. You just gotta go for it and you’ll get there. That’s what the heavens are. Like, Simon might not get it right now, but he knows. It’s in here,” he pounded his chest with his thumb. “He knows exactly what it is. That’s why I believe in him.”

Rossiu blinked, thankful he had followed Kamina’s finger up into the sky rather than his face. “But that doesn’t m—”

“—doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense. You just know it. And then it happens. Fighting spirit.”

In an odd way, Rossiu’s hair felt very heavy, like it was weighing on his head and he would have liked to have taken it all off like a wig just to think. But the more he thought, the more his head hurt. It didn’t make sense. Nothing Kamina said made sense. Everything about Kamina was the same way, this jumble of arrogance and unfailing confidence, repulsion and inexorable appeal, aversion and intrigue, discomfort and trust. And Simon, he remembered, loved it, and Rossiu had trusted Simon, at least, since the first time they looked at each other.

He couldn’t argue with anything Kamina said. Other than the throbbing against his skull, he had nothing with which he could combat it. It made no sense because, in a way that hit his head like a laser, so straightforward that it didn’t allow time for thinking, it made perfect sense. It wasn’t about thinking. It was about just knowing.

Kamina brought his hand back down and locked it onto his hip, huffing out a quick laugh. “So, what was your mom like?”

Rossiu finally got himself to look directly at Kamina, head empty and clear. “Very pretty. Very gentle. I don’t think she would have survived up here, but I don’t think she wouldn’t have tried, either.”

“ _Bet_  she was pretty,” he said. “You find her yet?”

All he had to do was glance quickly at the very tip of the popped collar of Kamina’s cape—his father’s cape—to know. He shook his head.

“I guess I did get sorta lucky,” Kamina said. “My old man knew I was on my way. I know he did. And now that I did find him, I’m just gonna go on and be even better than he was. That’s what you gotta do.”

“Be better than my mother?” Rossiu asked, a ways apart from himself.

Kamina turned around, cape fluttering after him like an unfurling blanket in the wind. He waved. “You know what I mean. Go get some sleep, Forehead.”

Rossiu inched forward, one hand on his mouth, one out towards Kamina. “Kamina, wait.”

He stopped and looked back. “Hmm?”

“M-may I…Would you like me to say a prayer? For your father?”

Smiling, Kamina turned right back around and kept on walking. “Say one for your mom. I’m good. We don’t need any of that.”

He watched him climb back up Gurren and step into the cockpit. Just before clamping the jaws shut to seal himself inside, he called out to him again. “Thanks, Rossiu.”

Rossiu told him thank you, as well, and Kamina disappeared behind bright metal teeth. He stood there, dumb, for quite a while. There was nothing much he could think to do, or say. Thinking had fallen out of the question like overripe fruit. Hazily, he caught himself wondering if Kamina felt the same way about Simon that Simon felt about him, but he shoved it out of his mind; none of his business. On wobbly legs, Rossiu wandered around the corner to where the Black Siblings slept, nothing in his mind but getting back to Kittan, who hopefully would be in a better mood.

But Kittan wasn’t there. Kiyal had fallen asleep halfway out of her blanket, while Kiyoh seemed to be trying to drift off; Kinon, though, was still sitting up, with her hands on the wings of her glasses like she’d either just removed them or was about to. Rossiu looked at the three of them, trying to see if maybe he’d just missed Kittan somewhere, but by the time he admitted he just wasn’t there, he went right back to Kinon.

“O-oh, Rossiu,” she said, fixing her glasses back in place. “Are you coming to bed?”

“I don’t know,” He looked around again. He hadn’t been thinking. He just missed him. “Wh-where’s Kittan?”

“Making himself tired,” she answered. “Th-that sort of thing. You know.”

Still not entirely relieved, Rossiu fiddled with his lips. “Oh. Um,” he paused.

It didn’t even really matter, he thought. Kittan could do whatever he wanted. Far be it from Rossiu to deny the man a walk to make himself sleepy. It wasn’t like Rossiu was even that tired, himself.

“Did you need to talk to him?” Kinon asked.

His mouth answered, “Yes,” for the rest of him. Kinon nodded and took her glasses back off, set them inside a little bag beside her blankets, and curled up into them.

“I—I think he went over there,” her hand poked up from the blankets and pointed, vaguely, towards the ledge. “I hope I’m right…I didn’t really notice…”

“It’s okay,” he answered. He’d already started to walk. “Goodnight, Kinon.”

“Goodnight.”

The moon lit Rossiu’s way, and he followed it. A night or two before, he’d noticed that the moon had disappeared. At the time, he’d chalked it up to clouds. From time to time, he knew, they floated in the way and blocked the moon, and always some stars as well, just like in the daytime when the whole desert would dim to just a minimal murk when a cloud eclipsed the sun. But the moon had returned, now as this thin sliver of silver like the end of a fingernail. For what felt like a long time, very long, Rossiu heard only his boots scraping against the dirt, sending pebbles careening across the ground, and the light wind doing the same.

He started to scale the ledge again. Steep as it had seemed earlier, it was twice as much so now, in the dark and with all the wear of the day dragging his body down to the ground, beckoning him back under the dirt. The ledge, he thought at first, was just too flat, too precise, to have been made by the elements alone. But he looked at it closer, the silver light shining on every ripple and imperfection in the stone. It wasn’t that flat. Some handprints marred it, some footprints that he recognized as his own, or as Yoko’s, as well as some nakibashiri paw prints. It had been there a long time, on its own. About halfway up, he slipped a little, and although he regained his footing, he decided to take a break and just sit for a moment, and listen.

There really was nothing to hear but the wind. Down below, it blew the canvases in which Yoko and Leeron slept, and the sent the blankets that covered the sisters rippling. It whistled. Spurred on, Rossiu tried to whistle, too. Just like Kittan always did, he touched his middle finger and his thumb together and brought them to his puckering lips, and blew. Nothing but air. He tried again; just a louder, harsher huff of air emerged. His lips were cold.

On a whim, and sick of hearing himself add to the breeze, he called out, just above a whisper. “Kittan? Are you out here?”

“Down here,” came the reply.

Rossiu looked from one side to the other, his hair whipping about his shoulders, but he looked down, as instructed. There, on the ground, beside the ledge’s ramp, Kittan stood looking up at him, almost entirely hidden in the shadows, save his hair, an eyebrow, an ear, and a shoulder.

“What’re you doin’ up there?” Kittan asked.

Rossiu could only scoot himself so close to the edge. He peered over it. “Looking for you.”

“Thought you were talkin’ to Kamina.”

“I was. I was going to go to bed, but you weren’t there, so I…” he shrugged. “…Wanted to come find you.”

Kittan appeared to duck his head back into the shadow, where he remained for quite a while. Rossiu’s eyes had started to adjust to the darkness, and when he squinted, he saw Kittan’s faintly discernable figure, so much darker than the land below him. “Come down here,” he said.

Rossiu started to push himself to his feet, but Kittan stopped him. “No, just—just jump.”

“What?” he sat back down and inched just a hair closer to the edge. He was at least ten, if not eleven feet from the ground. Brows knitting, he frowned. “No. It’s too far.”

“You scared?”

“I’m not jumping, Kittan.”

“Is it scarier than that gunmen from earlier? Any gunmen? Come on, Rossiu, I’ll catch you.”

“I can’t even see you.”

“Just jump, goddamn, I can see you fine.”

Rossiu sucked his lips into his mouth and sat still a moment. With a deep breath, he swung his legs around and dangled them over the edge, hands gripping tightly to the dirt.

He was greeted with nothing more than a greater view of the distance. It was still at least four feet to the top of Kittan’s head. “Are you absolutely sure about this?”

Kittan already had his arms lifted into the air, waiting for him. “You don’t jump soon, I ain’t even gonna try.”

His fingers scraped against the dirt, and he focused on Kittan down below until he had no room for anything else in his mind but where to aim. He closed his eyes and pushed himself off. The air rolled like bubbles after a dive up his neck, to his jaw, around behind his ears, and through his hair, and he felt Kittan’s arms around his thighs, and it all stopped. Suddenly, he was very warm. His hair fell back down around his shoulders, and he felt Kittan sort of adjusting his grip; at some point, Rossiu had wrapped his legs around his chest, and Kittan, apparently, saw fit to let him just be there. Rossiu didn’t move.

“See, it wasn’t even—it was nothing,” Kittan grumbled. His eyes were jittering a bit, trying to stay on some spot between Rossiu’s chest and his stomach. “Comin’ out here tryin’ to find me and you won’t even jump.”

Rossiu didn’t know how long he’d had his hands on Kittan’s shoulders; probably since he’d caught him. One hand shuffled along, palm following the motion of the fingers like a sluggish spider, in towards his collar, but stopped just shy of it. He didn’t much want to talk if Kittan wasn’t going to look directly at him.

But then he did, if only for a flash of a second. “What’d you talk to Kamina about?”

“His father. My mother.” He shrugged. Kittan, he knew, already knew about the heavens. “It was nice, actually.”

“Nothing about Team Gurren?” his eyes had fallen right back to whatever spot of Rossiu’s shirt they could find.

He shook his head.

“You’re not gonna go with them?”

“Why would I go with Team Gurren?” Kittan looked right back up at him, straight into his eyes like the rest of him didn’t even exist.

There was this frown, Rossiu had noticed, that Kittan always made when he was in complete and utter shock—the kind of shock that existed on the inside of him, rattling around. Rossiu almost wondered if he could feel it reverberating and bouncing around inside him, shaking, as his eyes grew wide and his cobalt irises shrank away into specks, and his mouth arched downward beyond the reaches of sadness, or anger, or disgust, to this ludicrous parabolic end. He did it a lot when he and Rossiu talked. It always lasted a while. He had to blink it away far more than once, again and again, shaking his head so all his uneven blond hair moved with it like tall grass in the wind.

“I-I mean, they’re nice people, and I certainly agree with them that we should get to live on the surface,” Rossiu added, watching Kittan try to abandon his expression. “But why would I go off with them when I’ve just met them today? I’m with you, Kittan.”

Every attempt Kittan had made to rid himself of his long-faced horror fell away into the rubbish heap. It returned with an absolute furious vengeance. Rossiu almost swore he felt his grip tightening on his thighs, and he only then really realized he hadn’t put him down yet. Kittan tried to look anywhere but at Rossiu, down at the ground, down where their bodies met, right back down to the ground that instant. His hand started to move back toward Kittan’s collar, and he had this urge the size of a speckle of sand to lean in, just to calm him down, but the rest of the theory exploded into grainy darkness at the tail end of it. He didn’t know what to do, so he kept still.

Only then did Rossiu hear what he’d said. He sort of hiccupped back a breath, and, far too late—no, it was never too late to clarify—added, “All of you. I’m with you all, am I not? You wanted me to introduce myself with you, right?”

“’Course we did,” Kittan muttered, in the middle of a frantic head shake.

He could breathe again. “Then why would I leave?”

Kittan shrugged, still not looking at him, save for quick little glances up from the corner of his eye. “’Cause, y’know. Look at ‘em. They’re fuckin’—they’re stealing gunmen, how did we—how didn’t we think of that? Thought you woulda been like, ‘oh, these idiots, it’s so obvious.’”

“I never had any idea.” While the heels of his palms started to rock back and forth, just barely rubbing, he still tried to compute how, exactly, even the beastmen could pilot the gunmen. He’d been inside Lagann, even, and it still amazed him.

“And, y’know, I dunno. Kamina—” he chewed on his lip for a second, then shrugged against Rossiu rubbing his hands down onto his shoulders. He tensed. “Uh. Ffff. Fuckin’. Kamina’s just. I dunno, can talk and everything. Fuckin’ bigshot, thinks he’s so great, all the girls do. You kept lookin’ at him, too, I thought you thought he was. I dunno.”

“He’s…”

Rossiu couldn’t make an assessment; factually, of course, he agreed. Kamina was a sight to behold and a pleasure to hear, and, crazy as the things he said and did may have been, as senseless, they far surpassed contagious. Hypnotic. There was something Rossiu wanted to say, but it never came to him, this stubborn ‘but’ that blocked what it preceded. Kittan already knew everything he thought of. Slowly, Kittan turned towards him, head following his eyes. Rossiu could only reassure him once more.

“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m staying with you.”

He’d confirmed it for himself. Kittan, though, had to drive it home, and fumbled for a second. “G-Good. Good. I-I gotta—I gotta put you down, huh?”

Maladroit as his movement was, Kittan managed to set Rossiu down on the ground. Rossiu wiped the dust from the seat of his pants, at last, and Kittan, taking a moment to regroup and let him do so, waited before taking him by the wrist to lead him back to the camp.

“Kittan,” Rossiu had let his voice drop to just above a whisper as they neared the others.

He seemed to be pulling his lips into his mouth to chew on them like bubblegum. He mumbled something monosyllabic and incoherent in return.

“Why did you keep me with you?” The gall made his own stomach fizz. “I mean, instead of dropping me off at another village?”

In the middle of a wide, bow-legged step, Kittan paused. Rossiu jerked to stop with him, but a second later, they were continuing on. “I dunno.”

A few steps passed in silence. Rossiu had about settled to drop it when Kittan, stiffly and from nowhere, added, “I told you already. I just like you a lot. I like talkin’ to you.”

They reached their little circle, where the girls had all, it seemed, fallen asleep. “I like you too,” Rossiu whispered. He paused by his blankets while Kittan picked up his pace to head back to his. “Talking to you.”

“G-Good. Cool.”

They said their goodnights before they had settled completely into their blankets. Rossiu rolled away from the moonlight to face the dark wall of rock beside him, not the least bit tired, but at least hopeful that he’d relax soon, or that his eyes would give out after a while to fall heavy and close on their own. Every so often, he heard Kittan shuffling around in between his quilts, and he’d shift around to catch a glimpse of him squirming to try to get comfortable. Rossiu had no idea how many times he turned to look before he realized Kittan had actually stopped moving and fallen asleep, and even then, he didn’t stop. He was tired, himself, but he still couldn’t sleep. His eyes bounced right back open every time he tried, and his legs curled up and stretched back out, and his shoulders got too hot under the quilt and then too cold outside of it, and he couldn’t even care that he couldn’t calm down. He couldn’t care. He recited it once, in his head, holding back a smile: He had a crush on Kittan.


	9. 9

What to do next? Kittan and Yoko chitchatted side-by-side after breakfast, and in the solitary moment Rossiu found himself able to push the sight of it out of his head, he rushed over to Simon with a polite, “May I speak with you?” He glanced around at the others, the sisters giggling amongst themselves while they finished packing up, Leeron trying to discuss something or another with Kamina up in Gurren’s mouth. They headed back over by Lagann, now parked in Gurren’s shade. Rossiu dropped his voice as low above a whisper as he could.

“You were right.”

Simon tilted his head and whispered back. “About what?”

“Kittan and me,” he answered.

“Y-you…You  _do_ have a crush on him?” he asked. His whisper nearly left him.

And Rossiu nodded, as calm now as he’d been jittery the night before.

Simon seemed to wait for him to say something more; when nothing came, he asked, “What are you gonna do, then?”

He felt his own eyes creep open wide. “What?”

Scraping his shoes against the dirt, Simon shrank away, crumpling like a discarded rag without totally falling. He shifted, turning slightly almost to try to get a better look at Lagann than Rossiu. “W-well, are you…You aren’t gonna just tell him, are you?”

“I shouldn’t tell him?” He hadn’t even considered it. Yesterday, he had definitely taken into account how wide the gap between Simon and Kamina seemed to be, like Simon stared at him from the top of a mountain. Kamina didn’t know. Suddenly, strangely, Rossiu became aware of his hands, and he had no idea what to do with them. He let his fingers flex out and curl back in toward his palms, again and again.

Simon was chewing on his lips, eating whichever words tried to come out of them as they escaped. “I…I don’t know, it’s just…If you tell someone you like them, and you don’t know if they like you back, it might be weird.”

Weird.

Rossiu found himself looking down at the ground as well, and Simon continued.  “I mean, it’s not that, um, you’d be weird, it’s just…It might make things weird, you know?”

Rossiu’s eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“’Cause…” in his periphery, Rossiu saw Simon lean down to let Boota jump onto his hand and dart up his arm and rest on his shoulder. “People can get weird if they know someone likes them that they don’t like. They don’t know how to act around them.”

“But why?” he asked. He looked up and found Simon focusing, with the attention of a hunter, on scratching Boota under the chin. “It’s all the same. Nothing has changed.”

Nothing but learning. Rossiu tried to figure out how in the world any of it would make a difference. He remembered before, when he figured it out and said it to himself, that he had a crush on Kittan; he’d regained control. His body had pitched a conniption fit until his brain, the watchful guardian, swooped in and put it back together. When he knew, when he had the answer, he could sleep. When he awoke, it still was nothing more than that: an answer. Simple. He had a name to put on how he felt about him, a diagnosis; he would have no reason anymore to grope desperately at the air anytime they might finish talking, trying to figure out what exactly to call this thing, their relationship, whatever it was. He knew he liked Kittan. Even in his less pleasant moments, hollering at his sisters or swearing with every other word, screaming at Kamina or moping in the corner by his lonesome, he liked him. He was still the same Kittan who had saved him, and who seemed, if not celebratory, at least welcoming whenever he happened upon him at night, when he went off to be alone and exhaust himself. He was still the same Kittan who talked to him, and who had been taking care of him. And Rossiu was still the same Rossiu he’d been even before he’d known what a crush was. There was no difference; only a badly-needed name.

“Y-yeah, but…” he groaned. “I dunno, I can’t explain it. It’s just that they’d know, is all. When people find out about stuff like that, it makes them feel different.”

That, at least, made sense. Rossiu hung his head.

They fidgeted together in silence for what could have been hours. All the conversations around them swelled like a chorus of insects and faded back into the landscape, ebbing and flowing again and again. Rossiu imagined Kittan and Yoko talking to each other, still, and not wanting to look back to check, he dug the heel of his boot into the ground.

“What do I do, then?” he asked.

Simon answered, “I don’t know.”

Rossiu brought his eyes back up to him and recalled how he’d seen him the very first time, this beady-eyed, gaunt little thing, silent and unsure, looking far past everything in the world only to terrify himself with the blurred glimpses of what he saw along the edges. He sank into himself. Rossiu tried to think of anything else to ask, any way he could siphon just the tiniest droplet of lukewarm knowledge from him, and when he couldn’t come up with anything, he just watched him. Simon couldn’t just vomit up a lie for him, no matter how sick he may have looked.

Behind them, with a thud and a flash of red, Kamina let himself drop off of Gurren’s knee and headed towards them. “Simon! Forehead! You two ready to head out?”

Simon looked up at him with a faint smile returning to his face, and he just began to nod when Kittan, from somewhere a bit away, called, “You ain’t takin’ Rossiu anywhere!”

On the back of his slowly trotting nakibashiri and clad in his cloak, with the hood tossed around his shoulders, Kittan rounded the row of rocks that had separated the main camp from the Black Siblings’ sleeping place the night before. He narrowed his eyes at Kamina, whose eyebrows rose up right along with his grin below.

“You comin’ with us, too, Eyebrows?” he asked. “You ever wanna prove you’re a man, y’know, Team Gurren’s where you’re gonna have to do it!”

Rossiu took one last look at Simon and gave him a silent goodbye nod. They exchanged smiles tight and dim and mild enough to relay the secrets under the older boys’ eyes, a code forged under the mandate of necessity. They would tell no one what they discussed. If they never met again, those smiles would creep across their lips in their graves. Rossiu turned and joined Kittan, seething, on the nakibashiri just as Kinon, Kiyal, and Kiyoh emerged from behind the rocks and joined them.

Kittan glanced around at his sisters. Taking his hands off the nakibashiri’s tail, he gave Rossiu the room he needed to climb aboard, into his lap, and he pulled the cloak around him. Only Rossiu’s eyes could reach to peer over the rim of the hood, and he looked back at Team Gurren.

From somewhere, Rossiu didn’t particularly take notice, Yoko had emerged to stand beside Kamina, and Leeron joined them as well, rubbing a long, slender finger across his lips like he was considering something so intensely as to taste it. For a brief moment, Rossiu regretted not talking to him more, but he filed the thought away for later review when he brought his hands to the nakibashiri’s tail and felt Kittan reach out and do the same just above. His hand brushed against Rossiu’s knuckle.

“Psh,” Kittan hissed, nudging the nakibashiri to turn just a degree. Rossiu looked up at him; he was leering out at Kamina from over his shoulder. “Yeah, well, if you ever wanna crawl outta your amateur stage and make a pro outta yourself, we might have some room for an idiot baby brother. We already got a smart one.”

He patted Rossiu on the head and left his hand there, holding him by the forehead, like he’d melt away if he didn’t keep him in place and force him to agree. As they turned, the girls shouted their goodbyes, mostly to Kamina, and Simon, Yoko, and Leeron waved them goodbye as well. Gurren sat behind the four of them, waiting to get back onto its feet again, a strange lonely glint from the sun hitting it right in the fang; in that moment, it went ignored, all attention and eyes on people, actual people. It waited. It could wait as long as it took. Rossiu’s last glimpse of them from the corner of his eye at the end of the turn showed Kamina lifting his hand into the air, probably to give one jerky wave, a half-salute. Kamina had his hand on Simon’s shoulder.

Perhaps Kittan sensed that Rossiu wasn’t doing his job; either way, he steered, and the second Rossiu noticed, he swung his eyes back to the front, intent on ignoring the opportunity to steal even the slightest glance at the retreating Team Gurren. He looked forward. As silent as Kittan behind him, while the girls chitchatted about Team Gurren and Kamina and nothing but, Rossiu tuned them out only by watching the land around and focusing without stopping. It all made him speculate far too much. The more he moved, the more he thought, and the tighter he held on to the tail, surely taking control of the reins, never thinking for a microsecond where he may have been leading them. The girls’ voices faded in and out with his thoughts, loud and clear, quiet and tingling, all unwanted. His mind absorbed and raced and pumped out thoughts free of restriction, like a despot.

How could Simon have gone for so long without letting Kamina know how he felt about him? Over all those years, he must have let something slip. How, then, could Kamina not know? Rossiu had only been in the company of the two of them for a day, and even he could see all the time Simon had spent pining and swooning and aching for him, gazing out not even at him, but beyond him, to this distant, throbbing void. Simon watched him and knew he wasn’t with him, and that was all he saw: Kamina with him, adoring him, but blissful still without being with him. How could Kamina not know? Simon was sure to be there sending his longing across every stretch of sun-parched land to him every time they saw one another. Kamina had to know. He had to.

So then Rossiu wondered why he did nothing in return, if he did know. Kamina saw Simon yearning for him and he relegated his own perspective to silver-tongued tangos inside their respective mechs, or to a footnote tacked onto the end of a conversation with a boy he barely knew in the lonely dark before sleep, all for show. Why could he say with such exuberance everything but anything on the matter of Simon’s feelings for him? Why couldn’t he say if he felt the same? They’d come to the surface in search of heaven and they’d only found a garble of holy words they couldn’t translate.

Had they grown complacent that they thought they couldn’t make their bond even better than it already was? Rossiu’s stomach sank into a heavy globe inside himself, and he couldn’t look forward anymore. He wondered if he’d grown just as smug.

Rossiu fought to keep his eyes open. From the location of the sun, he could tell they were heading back south, but he forgot as soon as he recognized it. His ears started to pick up the voices around. Without trying, he eavesdropped.

“Kamina says such amazing things…” Kinon said, voice just above a whisper. “…I just know he’s going to be able to take back the surface.”

“I know…I can’t believe someone so handsome would think to steal a gunmen,” Kiyoh swooned.

“I don’t know why we didn’t think of it!” Kiyal cried. “I wanna take a gunmen, I’ll do it!”

“But it would be so scary, wouldn’t it…?” Kinon murmured.

Kiyal huffed. “No way. You just gotta do what we do, kick their asses and then jump on in, that’s what Kamina said!”

“It wasn’t that easy, remember?” Kiyoh asked. “He said it didn’t accept him right away.”

“But then it  _did_!  I’m gonna take one. I’ll do it.” In the second in which Kiyal paused, Rossiu could swear Kittan leaned in, almost crowding him down against the fur of the nakibashiri. “What do you think, bro?”

He wheeled around to look back at her. “I already told you! You ain’t tryin’ any of that typa shit while I’m around!”

She groaned. “But I can do it! I know I can!”

“Not if I say you can’t!” he roared. “You wanna go steal a gunmen so bad, Kiyal, go try doing what  _Kamina_ says, and then we’ll see what’s—what happens. See if you make it.”

She paused again. “Don’t hafta be such a jerk.”

Nobody said a thing. Rossiu had inched his hand up to nudge it against Kittan’s, and Kittan’s hold on the tail loosened just the slightest bit. Same as ever. Kittan offered a grunt as an apology. Rossiu peered out ahead and watched the land, sprawling out and rolling ahead and beneath him, and the sky, with the sun hovering in the corner of the blue expanse like the sidelong gaze of a spy.

“Why are we going back the way we came?” Rossiu asked.

He almost wondered if any of the others had heard him. He received not even a shift of a body as an answer until Kittan took his hands off the nakibashiri’s tail and held onto it by the fur. He looked over at Kiyoh, who stared back at him with wide blue eyes for a still number of seconds before tightening her lips and nodding; he exchanged glances with Kinon and Kiyal.

Kittan sighed. “I think maybe you guys oughta go back with Team Gurren.”

In the same second, Kinon gasped and Kiyal screeched out an elongated, “What?”

“Go with Team Gurren, I just said!” he barked. “You go now, you can catch up with ‘em. They ain’t that far.”

“But why?” Kinon asked. She still sat a bit awkwardly on her nakibashiri, and when she leaned forward, she wrapped her arms around its tail like she’d terrified herself in moving at all. “I thought—”

“I gotta go take care of something,” he said. “Just go with them, okay? We can find you again easier that way, it ain’t a big deal.”

“Wait,” Kiyoh leaned forward, too, now; her eyebrows knitting just a bit, she pursed her lips and studied her brother, as if entrapping him in eye contact would keep him from doing whatever he may have been planning. “What ‘we,’ Kittan?”

Rossiu squeaked when Kittan wrapped his arm around his waist and pulled him up against him; his back bounced against his stomach, and his hair scrunched up and tangled together against his chest. Kittan leaned forward, his chin grazing the top of Rossiu’s head.

“I need Rossiu for this. I ain’t doin’ shit without him.”

For a second, Kiyoh’s face went as blank as if it had lost all its features. Her eyes narrowed, though, and she looked down. She brought her nakibashiri to a halt; the other girls followed, and after a few slowing steps, Kittan and Rossiu did the same.

“Fine,” Kiyoh said. “But you’re not leaving without giving us a decent goodbye.”

“No!” Kiyal yelped. She leapt off her nakibashiri and stormed over to Kittan, poking him in the chest and narrowly avoiding letting her fingertip collide with Rossiu’s eye. “No! You stupid jerk, you guys can’t  _leave_! How long are you gonna be gone? What are you gonna do?”

“Kiyal, calm down,” Kiyoh said. She dismounted her nakibashiri, but stayed by its side.

“I’ve left you tons of times, Kiyal, don’t be stupid!” Kittan shouted back. “I always come back, don’t I?”

“Why’s Rossiu get to go?” she cried.

“’Cause he knows where we’re gonna go. You saw him. He’s leadin’ the way.”

Rossiu’s head bobbed back. He saw Kiyal lean in towards him and open her mouth to demand where, exactly, he thought he was going to take her brother, but he looked up at Kittan, dumbfounded. “I don’t—”

“Yeah, you do,” Kittan said. “And it ain’t any of your business,” he placed his hand on Kiyal’s shoulder. “Where we go,” he got off the animal’s back, taking the cloak with him and leaving Rossiu out in the open. “Or what we do,” he put his other hand on her other shoulder and shoved his face into hers. “Idiot.”

He pulled her into a hug. Rossiu watched the two of them, and when Kiyal brought her face up onto his shoulder, wrapping her arms around him, he saw the tears streaming from her eyes, wide open and looking out at nothing.

Another hand, wrapped in a tan glove, crept around Kittan’s shoulder. Kinon pulled herself into her brother’s shifting arms, and Kiyoh came around to join, as well. The four of them stood embracing in a group like they’d shield one another from the elements, Kiyal stifling her sobs into the cloth of Kittan’s cloak.

“You’re gonna be fine, alright? We’re gonna be fine. Ain’t shit at all gonna happen to us,” Kittan said, not at any one of them in particular. “Love you guys.”

One of them, maybe two, maybe all three, swelled up and told him, “I love you, too, Kittan.”

Rossiu had forgotten how to think about where they were supposed to be going, or why. He let his hands sit limp and idle in his lap and watched them all. He’d never seen anything like it at home. All the families in Adai were these chipped fragments of what they, at some point, must have been; fathers had been sent to the surface, mothers died in labor, children didn’t live long enough to learn how to breathe the stagnant, choking air that filled the halls. When a family had the luck to stay together, they cowered in fear of the day they’d be separated and disguised the thought under the thick paint of the Face-God’s blessing, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. His mother didn’t hold him like that when she went to the surface. He wondered if anybody in Adai really knew what to do with themselves, when he looked at the Black Siblings and they blended into each other as if it were their true form. Maintaining separate bodies must have been painful.

They stayed that way for a long time, not budging. Rossiu didn’t dare say a word, or reach out to remind any of them that he was there; he could have faded away from the lot of them, into the ether, and he wouldn’t have minded. He saw only the back of Kittan’s head as he stroked Kiyoh’s shoulder with his thumb. All four of them in these long black things that reached down to the ground, huddled together, they melded into a mass, and Rossiu sat on the sidelines, silent, light, smiling to himself. He would never have wanted to meet Kittan in Adai. Kittan from Bachika was the only proper Kittan.

The siblings broke apart like sections of a fruit, and as Rossiu tried to glean a view of each of their faces parting from the crowd, Kiyal launched herself into view and threw her arms around him. Bony as she was, she nearly sent him careening off the other side of the nakibashiri.

“Better not take forever,” she said, her voice shaky. “You hold my brother up, I’m gonna—you just—better not.” He didn’t get to hug her back before she pulled away, wiping her eyes, and headed back to her nakibashiri. She stood beside it, fists clenched at her sides, looking down at the ground.

He managed to return Kinon’s hug, though, when she approached a moment later. She was still warm from hugging her brother, one side a bit more so than the other, and her bleary eyes brought a coat of fog to her glasses. She merely told Rossiu goodbye and to keep safe, and he murmured the same. Quiet and trembling slightly, Kinon pulled away from him as if she wasn’t sure it was safe to do so. Rossiu nodded at her, and she nodded back after a pause he took to signify contemplation. They’d be okay.

“Rossiu,” Kiyoh said. This time, Rossiu had readied himself, and thankfully, Kiyoh stooped to avoid pressing her chest into his face. That burden relieved, he still didn’t quite know what to do with his face, so he angled it away from her, resting his chin on her shoulder. Her hands on his waist, she turned her head and whispered in his ear. “Take care of Kittan, okay? And he’ll take care of you.”

He nodded.

“He really likes you, you know that?” she added. He almost jolted out of her hug, but she eased away, smiling. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Kiyoh walked over to Kittan and gave him one last kiss on the cheek; he tried to wince away, not even attempting to put his whole heart into the jerk of his head. Kiyoh gave Rossiu another wave when she walked past him, back around to her nakibashiri, and got on. Kinon, too, had gotten back onto hers, and only Kiyal stood as if debating whether she should punch her brother, Rossiu, or the poor nakibashiri.

“Go, Kiyal,” Kittan said. “I’ll find you guys, I promised like a million times already.”

“When?” She spoke through clenched teeth.

“Doesn’t fuckin’ matter when, god damn!” he cried. “I’m just gonna, okay? Go!”

Still barely holding her tears back, Kiyal hunched back as if she’d leap forward and send her fist into his face at any second. Instead, she looked up at him and cried out, “I’m getting myself a gunmen!” She hopped onto her nakibashiri and sent it speeding back off north.

Startled as they were exasperated, Kinon and Kiyoh guided their animals to follow her. They turned half around to wave back at Kittan and Rossiu, Kiyoh blowing them both kisses, and when Kittan raised his hand to wave back at them, Rossiu lifted his own to follow.

“She ain’t gettin’ a gunmen,” Kittan said. He dropped his hands down and folded them at his chest, sighing. “Kiyoh won’t let her either.”

At some point, Rossiu realized, he’d spun himself around to watch the girls zooming off into the distance until they shrank to black-and-white grains of sand joining with a bright red pebble far down the way. He looked up at Kittan just as Kittan looked back down at him. His eyes were a dull shade of pink, tired-looking, moist. Rossiu hesitated just long enough to figure it out, and slid off the nakibashiri to join Kittan at his side.

Once again, Rossiu stood on his toes, reached up, and wiped his eyes. Wherever they were going, he was sure they’d both need to see. Kittan held him tight as they rode off, back down south, under the shifty gaze of the sun. He’d ask later and enjoy the alone time now. He led the way.


	10. 10

The more he thought about it, the less Rossiu was sure he could keep going. He figured it out, he was sure, only moments after the girls took off to rejoin Team Gurren, after which he and Kittan rode for hours in silence they both seemed to welcome. Once Rossiu knew the answer, his voice fell from his throat into his stomach. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, speak; he had problems to solve.

They were going back to Adai Village. Seven days back south, turning a corner just outside of the purple stone marking Shoubou Village, and another four days west. Kittan needed Rossiu to follow the sun; he was the one with the memory, with that brain of his that knew so many big words and knew how to speak and who had the connection to the village with the unmanned gunmen. Rossiu wondered at first if this was why Kittan had kept him around, but no; if Kittan had known humans could hijack gunmen when they first met, he would have already gotten one, years ago.

Kittan, as usual, held onto him with one hand, adjusting his grip whenever Rossiu shifted in place. He was not a tool.

Rossiu imagined the two of them descending the staircase back into Adai. He remembered when he’d climbed it the day after his expulsion, and how, towards the top, the light of the moon and the stars had fallen onto each stone step and glistened on the surface like puddles. He’d thought he might slip. So he wondered what time of day they’d arrive back; he could only imagine the afternoon, when the sun turned a gaudy fuchsia, flanked by golden strands of clouds, and the harshest light of the day would slip down under the surface until it faded into the shadow with each step they took until they were blind. They’d look far back up to the dot through which they’d emerged and the sun would be gone, and they’d pry open the door before them.

What if someone Rossiu had known had returned to Adai, after receiving the blessing? It had never happened. Those chosen by the Face-God were released from the misery ubiquitous in its place of dwelling and went among the higher gods, in paradise, where there was always a light overhead and everything was in abundance, save for worry. They would have no reason to return; they would have no means. They thought that stepping through the door was a spiritual death, of sorts; the body survived, but the soul went to a better place. The body was to be kept alive long enough to let the soul arrange its business with the gods. Rossiu had trusted that. He had known the facts.

But he hadn’t died. He’d come close a few times, but he hadn’t died. And now he was returning, with Kittan in tow, disciples of one another. What would the villagers say of a boy who returned from the dead?

And what would Rossiu say to them? To the Father? Of course he wanted to tell them the truth: that the surface was anything but heaven, that the face-gods were controlled by human-animal hybrids bent on genocide, that their deity, the one under whose watch they’d all lived their lives, was nothing but a discarded weapon long forgotten, and that the only way they’d be able to truly deliver themselves from the pain, the misery, everything inherent in merely stepping foot in Adai’s poorly lit grounds, was to send this foul-mouthed, quick-tempered, stuttering young man to steal their god. To possess their god. To resurrect their god.

But his mother and the Father had told him of Adai’s even poorer condition before the establishment of the religion. Back then, they lived beyond their means. There were too many people—hundreds, if he remembered correctly—and each of them kept a miserly hold on whatever food and supplies they could pilfer. No one shared. They lied and stole to keep themselves and their families, if not healthy, at least alive. Men and women alike went malnourished; starving mothers died giving birth to malformed babies that died minutes or, if they were fighters, hours later. Every villager was in business for him or herself.

And then the Father, with his scriptures in hand, took over, and handed down the decrees from the Face-God, and held the first ceremony to send the first of the Face-God’s chosen to the Holy Lands. With fewer people came less death, less starvation, more food, a spartan kind of abundance. They had no choice but to work with one another. Cooperation became the standard. Things cleaned up, things calmed down, and all the villagers turned their heads to the Face-God and thanked him for his mercy and his wisdom, all while shrinking away to avoid locking onto those faded, chipped eyes. If the Face-God truly took note of them, it could only be a matter of time before they’d be next to contribute to the stability they needed. Adai Village was rebuilt on soil fertilized by sacrifice, and life trudged on accordingly, every day, for fifty people at a time.

If they lost the religion, they’d win the chance to make a home, a rightful home, for themselves on the surface, but fall apart in the meantime. But if they kept the religion, clinging desperately to the Face-God as if begging for a departing kiss, they’d prove themselves as stagnant as the water in which the god sat. Rossiu came to the conclusion sooner than he would have liked, and his palms grew clammy against the nakibashiri’s tail.

And even if, somewhere in the future, Kittan taking control of the Face-God ended in victory for all of humanity trapped under the dirt, would the people of Adai, Rossiu’s people, want to emerge? Rossiu accumulated a litany of questions for the Father so long that his head nearly slumped forward under the weight of them all. He couldn’t be sure he’d remember them by the time they arrived.

He kept steering, though. He headed straight down south and watched the sun pass from his right to his left all the while. Kittan wanted him there, and he wanted to be there for Kittan, with him.

Yet he didn’t know what to say to Kittan, either. Until they stopped at twilight under the shadow of a volcanic neck he remembered passing early in the afternoon two days before, he settled on nothing. Kittan seized a hold of the time like he’d planned on stopping there; as soon as he dismounted the nakibashiri, he took his bow and arrows from a larger saddlebag and told Rossiu to go forage while he hunted. He took off toward a small hill of boulders and stood at the top of it, bow and arrow at the ready, and surveyed the land on the other side. Rossiu watched his back. Only his head moved, first to one side, then the other. He lifted his hand once to smooth his hair back down onto his head as if readying it to tie it back, but it still hadn’t grown back. He held his bow again and headed down the other side of the hill.

It didn’t seem like the kind of place where many animals would gather. Only a small pond sat undisturbed nearby, and a few patches of brushy grass dotted the land all around. Rossiu was sure he couldn’t find any fruits or vegetables because there just plain weren’t any in this barren little pocket of earth, but he looked back to try to find Kittan so many times, he wondered if he just couldn’t concentrate. He’d own up to the possibility.

Rossiu found nothing edible. He plucked some grasses from the ground just to eyeball whether he could stomach them, which he couldn’t, and came across a cluster of white berries he remembered Kiyoh saying were poisonous. Rossiu pushed himself up from the ground, where he’d sat to try to squint at the sparse flora, and wondered what he’d do if, at some point, he came across a new type of fruit or vegetable he hadn’t seen before; he hoped would Kittan know what was and wasn’t toxic.

He brushed his hands on his pants when he stood and set to work laying out the blankets. If he couldn’t find food for himself, he’d at least help Kittan some way or another. As the retreat of the sun painted the land a deeper and hazier shade of blue, he struggled to detach each saddlebag from the whimpering nakibashiri, and struggled even further to pull the blankets out. Each and every one of them sprawled out as soon as he pulled it free; he’d yanked the first out with such force he nearly fell backwards. They were longer than he was tall, and he had no way of keeping them from trailing in the sand. Once he sprawled them out, though, he didn’t have much trouble folding them. He’d done it plenty of times in Adai.

In Adai. He surveyed his work and imagined making his bed back there again, and then making one for Kittan in one of their many abandoned rooms. If they let the both of them in. If they made it. If they could do it.

Night arrived far more quickly than Rossiu would have estimated it would. With his body stiff and forcing his mind to focus only on adjusting his eyes to the encroaching darkness, he gathered a few armfuls of parched brush and took a match from one of the bags and set a fire. Whenever Kittan got back, Rossiu supposed he’d cook for himself. He lay down on his blankets and waited.

He nearly drifted to sleep. He’d started to review his list of things he’d ask the Father, and things he’d ask Kittan someday, but eventually it all blurred together and conglomerated into this image of Kittan stepping into the lake and walking right up to the Face-God. He missed how it opened for him, or how he would force it open, but the next thing he knew, the Face-God moved about, its carved features glowing under candlelight from different, new angles, and it spoke with Kittan’s voice. “ _That’s pretty messed up, Rossiu,_ ” he said.

He woke up after lurching forward with some uncontrollable twitch of his whole body. When he opened his eyes, he saw Kittan’s boots shining on the other side of the fire, and he sat down on the ground. He held a dead chasing heron, its feathers already plucked from its black skin, and he skewered it on an arrow to hold it over the fire.

Kittan’s eyes dropped. “You awake?”

Rossiu only nodded. In his head, he recited the prayer for the dead animal, and his lips moved just slightly to mouth the words.

“Sorry I took forever, I just wanted to get this thing’s feathers off,” he said, slowly rotating the heron over the flames. “Didn’t think you’d wanna see that.”

 _Peace with our holy Face-God, amen._ He could hardly even see the heron through the blinding glow of the flames, through his mind’s view of the commons of Adai. His thoughts kidnapped his tongue.

Kittan shifted in his seat, once or twice glancing over at Rossiu. The flames twirled and reached up toward the sky like waggling fingers, popping like the bones inside. Rossiu watched him through the orange veil of it and felt a bead of sweat drip from his forehead onto the blanket below.

“That makes you feel better, doesn’t it?” Kittan asked.

Trance shattered, Rossiu looked up at him; he recoiled slightly, sure he could feel his pupils adjusting for the light. “What?”

“Sayin’ the uh…The prayer,” he said. He flicked his wrist, not really turning the heron on the arrow, just rolling it to and fro. “Every time we gotta eat one of these guys, you go to it and do your little—do your thing. Say the prayer.”

He hadn’t exactly realized, when he did it, that he’d mouthed along, but he couldn’t deny that he had. Rossiu hid his lips behind his fist and huddled into the blankets. “Y-yes. I suppose it does.”

Kittan flicked his wrist again, just once; when he finished, he switched hands. “I never actually, uh…Never actually heard what you say. I just see you doin’—you, like…You don’t even talk, but you still—say it? I dunno. What are you even saying?”

He shriveled further into the blankets, away from Kittan. His eyes, in a distant place toward the back, throbbed. He wondered if he could just scoot further and further away until he came around in a full circle around the whole of the universe until he ended up at Kittan’s back, where he could talk to him without seeing him, but only hear his voice and feel his body.

Rossiu winced and punished himself for his cowardice. Biting his lip, he looked into Kittan’s eyes and hesitated briefly. “I…I’m just saying the initial prayer we give for anyone who has died. ‘This is a life that has aided in the survival of the multitudes, and will soon join the hand-picked for the glory of the Holy Lands. We give thanks for this gift. You shall be rewarded. Peace with our holy Face-God, amen.’”

“…That’s sorta nice,” Kittan nodded.

 Rossiu’s eyes gave another hot throb. He clenched them tight, telling himself not to cry again. It would be ridiculous of him to do such a thing. He just couldn’t. There was nothing to cry about.

He remembered the years he’d spent without a solitary tear escaping the throttlehold of his eyes. He’d seen too much in Adai, and heard too much about what they’d escaped, how brave the sacrifices of the past, and all the normalities of the present: every chosen person leaving the community for heaven, every sobbing orphan, every corpse, every stillbirth, every old malnourished body wringing itself dry of its last hours of life to call on Rossiu and the Father to bless them, please, they needed salvation before they could risk putting time into their children and their grandchildren. They put the Face-God before their families and their friends and themselves, not to aid in a greater cause, but out of fear. They accepted that they had to sacrifice themselves out of necessity; they shoved their own lives aside to make amends with the divine in the last moment, if they hadn’t been lucky enough to receive the blessing. Everyone knew they had to leave or die, so they prepared for it their whole lives, and cut themselves off. He remembered all the wonders of the Face-God of which his mother spoke, and he couldn’t remember her saying she loved him. Rossiu had accepted every instance of it. Rossiu accepted his own sacrifice, and his mother’s, and he never cried, because that was how it was. Life was hard. Only through severing themselves from all they knew underground, all they fought not to love so they could be ready when the time came to leave, could they earn happiness.

And it had been all Rossiu had known. He tried, in his head, to make the phrase, “I love you, Rossiu,” emerge, in some voice, any voice, that he could scrape together from memory, and it never came to be. He scratched at the blanket and buried his face in it.

 “Why do you want to take the Face-God, Kittan?” he asked. He heard his voice, shaky and muffled but deliberate. The words chose themselves perfectly from amongst the clutter.

“It ain’t just about the Face-God,” Kittan replied. He didn’t mumble. He spoke clearly, and he replied in an instant. He was, for once, absolutely sure. “I gotta see this place you’re from.”

“Why?”

But he paused. He lifted the heron out of the fire and inspected it, then lowered it back down into it, giving it a turn. “…I just gotta. Why, you don’t wanna go back?”

“We can’t go back.” Rossiu shook his head, ruffling his eyebrows against the fabric.

“Why not?”

“No one has ever returned from the surface,” he answered. “The surface is heaven to us—them. You can’t come back if you die.”

“You ain’t dead, Rossiu.”

“They don’t know that,” he murmured, pushing back another threatening swell of tears. “I didn’t even know that. The belief is that you climb the steps and your soul joins the gods somewhere along the way. You die. That is what we believe.”

Kittan went silent and waited, either for Rossiu to continue or for him to turn his head and look back up. Finally pulling the heron from the fire for good, he waited a moment more. With an inquiring rasp in his voice, he muttered, “So…”

“Kittan, the religion is all we have. It’s the only thing keeping us alive.”

He held the heron, still speared on the arrow. “So if we go down there, and I take your god, the whole thing’ll be fucked up.”

The fire crackled and hummed, and Rossiu took a sharp breath to keep the tears inside his head.

“That’s fuckin’ ridiculous.”

Rossiu couldn’t stop himself from turning his head as quickly as he could towards him. Kittan was leaning back now, finishing a fairly large bite of the heron. He swallowed, and with the arrow on which the bird was skewered still in his hand, he pointed at Rossiu. “You even see why we’re up here?”

He shook his head. “I beg your pardon…?”

“We’re fighting up here! We’re…” he swished the heron around in the air, squinting off and peering out toward the distance. “…Fuckin’, like—look, it doesn’t matter to the beastmen if you got a religion, okay? They’re gonna come down there and fuck your shit eventually. Either that or you guys are gonna run outta food and everything before then. Don’t shit at all last forever down there.” He took another bite of the heron and, perhaps to delight Rossiu’s sense of manners, waited to finish it before he continued. “Shit gets fucked up. We gotta fuck shit up before they get to do it first.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s there to understand?” Kittan roared. “You gotta—they’re—fuckin’—place of yours is so goddamn sad! If you care about ‘em, all the people down there, you gotta tell ‘em what it’s really like up here, and what your gods are! ‘Cause then they can help, everyone can help!”

Rossiu began to push himself up from the blanket. “Help what?”

“Help take the surface back!” he cried. “That’s what we gotta do! Everybody! Thought you wanted to do that!”

He was sitting upright now. He blinked, once, and then again, before he realized he and Kittan had locked eyes, and they looked away from one another at once. Under his breath, Kittan mumbled something, but Rossiu let it go.

“I want to,” Rossiu answered. “I want us all to be able to live on the surface. I don’t want them to have to live like this.”

“Then we gotta go,” Kittan growled, glaring down at the ground to his side as if it had offended him personally. “They gotta know this shit so they can save themselves.”

Kittan’s foot began bouncing against the sand. He kept focusing on that spot to his side, and his mouth tightened. Rossiu only watched for a moment. He pushed himself onto his feet and ambled over to Kittan’s side, where he dropped like a ragdoll onto his knees and wrapped his arms around Kittan’s shoulders. He tucked his head into the crook of his neck.

“Rossiu, what—” he didn’t even bother finishing. His body stiff, hunched, and uncomfortable, he waited a moment before lifting his arms, still holding onto the heron on the arrow, to put them around Rossiu’s waist and hug him back.

Rossiu could have given up control over all his joints and his muscles and crumpled right up against Kittan. His body had a much more comfortable warmth to it than the flickering darts the fire sent towards him. Rossiu felt himself begin to sway, and he realized it was Kittan, rocking back and forth in his seat, directing the movement. He gripped tighter, and Kittan did, too. Something in his stomach felt as if it did a little flip, and his dull fingertips raked against Kittan’s shirt, and he turned his head in towards the pillar of Kittan’s neck. He smiled. He’d decide later whether he’d tell Simon about it when they met again.

“Y-you, uh,” Kittan started to look around, but broke away. “You find anything to eat?”

“No,” Rossiu replied, the corner of his lips brushing against Kittan’s collarbone.

Kittan sat up straight and took his hands off Rossiu’s body. “Th-there, uh—there’s—nothin’ out—there wasn’t anything?”

He shook his head. His cheek was still warm. “No,” he repeated.

“Then—” he waved the heron before Rossiu’s face, and Rossiu backed a few inches away. “—Here. I know—I know you don’t like eating animals, I really don’t wanna do this to you, but you gotta eat.” He twisted around and pulled a pocket knife from a bag he’d placed behind him. Almost in a clumsy way, as if straining to hold the animal still in front of him, he sliced an uneven bit of it off and handed it, speared on the knife tip, to Rossiu.

Rossiu tensed. The last time he’d tried to eat any meat, he’d fallen ill; he hesitated in peeling it off the knife, and when he finally did, he held it in front of his eyes and turned it back and forth. It was nearly the same shade of beige-white as his skin.

“Eat,” Kittan said. He turned himself the rest of the way forward to face the fire and cut off another piece for himself.

Rossiu recited the prayer again, shut his eyes, and put it in his mouth. He could have made a game of trying to keep it off his tongue. He shuddered when he swallowed.

An hour, three more thin slices, and a crawl into his blankets later, and Rossiu felt his stomach churn and surge up into his chest again. He’d eaten much more of the heron than he had of the flying tanuki all that time ago, and the ache increased accordingly. He held his stomach as if it would rupture through his skin.

“You ain’t used to it, is all,” Kittan said, rooting through another bag, squinting for something. “I seen it happen, y’know, people eat shit they ain’t used to and they get sick from it. Oh sh—ah.”

He pulled something from the bag, studied it briefly, and crawled over to Rossiu’s side. Whatever he had, he held it like it was some kind of delicate prize between his thumb and forefinger. Rossiu closed his eyes, and a moment later felt Kittan’s hand on the top of his head; he ran his fingers through his hair.

“Hey,” Kittan said. “This is gonna help, okay?”

When he opened his eyes again, Kittan held a little sprig of some ferociously green herb far too close to his face. Rossiu gave his eyes a second to adjust their focus, and just when he felt the headache that told him he’d gone momentarily cross-eyed, he propped himself up on his elbow and took the herb.

“I dunno what it’s called,” Kittan shrugged. “We don’t really like to use it too much ‘cause it kinda…Can fuck you up a little if you don’t eat it right, but it really helps to have around. Just chew on it ‘til it doesn’t really have a taste anymore, then swallow it.”

“What do you mean, it…” Rossiu couldn’t say the word. He bit his lip.

“Don’t worry about it, just do what I said.” Looking away, he gave Rossiu’s hair another stroke. “I don’t want you goin’ to bed all sick.”

Rossiu lingered for a moment. He sniffed the herb and found it had no real discernable smell; it had dried out quite a bit, it seemed, for how green it was. He brought it slowly to his mouth and bit off a single tiny leaf.

He thought for a second that his tongue had gone numb, but he realized, as he bit off a few more leaves, that the plant merely had a strong minty taste. He put the rest of it in his mouth and chewed. Easing himself back down, he brushed his fingers against Kittan’s. “Thank you,” he said.

“Yep.”

The fire had dulled to a shallow orange glow. Mindful not to swallow any of the herb and still fighting off the pain, Rossiu looked up at the sky and tried to keep his mind on chewing, closing his throat, and watching the stars.

He still wondered if the Father had been to the surface. Had he made it up here? Had he ever dared to push the rock aside to ascend the staircase to the surface? How much did he know?

And he wondered, quite suddenly, where the scriptures had come from. Only the Father had ever known of them; he was the only one who had ever held them in his possession. He had to have gotten that book from somewhere, and Rossiu, a twinge of mutiny zipping through his thoughts like a cockroach away from light, wondered if he’d found it on the surface. What did it say? With every question, he wanted more and more to pick himself up, fight through his aching stomach, wake up the nakibashiri, and ride.

Instead, he felt himself melting against the pillow. He swallowed the flavorless bits of the herb, wanting just to lie still and float through the air for ten days back to Adai.

His head rolled and he looked up at Kittan. He was sitting hunched over beside Rossiu and gazing up at the sky. The closer Rossiu inspected, he found that Kittan’s eyes were trembling a bit, jittering as if studying one star after another, each tiny dot of light on its own. He didn’t need to ask what he was thinking about. His eyes gazed forever. And he just stayed there beside Rossiu, maybe keeping guard, maybe trying to make sure he ate the herb correctly, maybe falling asleep sitting up. Thinking. Hard.

“When we get to Adai Village,” Rossiu said. “Do not try to take the Face-God right away.”

Kittan turned, one thick eyebrow raised. “You comin’ up with plans?”

He closed his eyes. “My people need to understand first. Just let me talk. Please. I know them.”

“Whatever you say.” He turned back to look up at the sky, toward the stars that shined down on him. “Whatever you say.”

Rossiu couldn’t look away from him. He could never remember ever thinking to himself that Kittan was good-looking, but he really did; he found it curious. On the other hand, when he’d met Kamina, it was only by the grace of his more abrasive tendencies that Rossiu could focus on anything but how fully he agreed with Kiyoh and Kinon and Kiyal, and even Simon, on his appeal. Kamina had flair in excess, and Rossiu couldn’t be sure anybody would notice anything else about him before that.

But he already knew Kittan, and when he finally looked at him right then, from the side and down below, he really did think he looked nice. He felt silly for ever having thought of him as frightening. Again he was glad he hadn’t met Kittan in Adai Village. Kittan knew things nobody would ever have learned there. Rossiu wanted to know everything he could.

“…Kittan,” he said. His stomach had begun to settle, but he started to look away, nervous, wondering if he should ask.

“Hmm?”

He couldn’t back down. “M-may I ask…What were your parents like?”

Kittan’s hand closed into a fist that second, and he didn’t reply for quite a few more. “Really…Really good,” he started to nod to himself, and, curiously, a smile stretched onto his face. “Loved ‘em. ‘Course I did. Dad was really cool, he—I dunno, everyone always said I looked like him, but I know I didn’t, I got Mom’s eyebrows. Kiyal got that hair of hers from him. Dad was one of the first guys to go up to the surface after the roof got all…” he waggled his hand. “…Fucked up, and he came back, like, some hours later and he was all sunburnt. But he still worked. He was one of the…Farmers, I guess, took care of the livestock.

“Mom was cool as hell, too. Kiyoh looks like her, ‘cept, y’know, eyebrows,” he brushed his own. “Hair was more like mine. She made guitars. She got sorta pissed that I wanted to play drums at first but then she got, I dunno, haha, I was good at ‘em, so she didn’t care as much. She looked out for us like crazy, though. Like, other girls harassed Kinon a lot ‘cause she’s so shy, and Mom would go tell their parents to tell ‘em to fuck off. I saw her doin’ that all the time and I started doin’ it, too, whenever Mom was working or whatever. Nobody was gonna fuck with me or my sisters, ever.

“I mean, people didn’t really fuck with us too much, most of the people in Bachika were cool as hell, but kids can be assholes sometimes. I remember…Ugh, when Kiyoh fuckin’…Was, startin’, y’know, ffffh—” he cupped his hands in front of his chest, starting close and expanding out. “These gross assholes would be like, ‘hey, baby,’ and I’d have to go kick their ass. Idiots. I don’t stand for that shit.

“Kiyal just followed me around all the time, like she still does. Wants to be like me. Wish I fuckin’ knew why. Thinks she’s a boy, she’s crazy, hahaha. She started tryin’ to stick up for, like, the real little kids, if she ever saw anybody fuckin’ with ‘em. She got in trouble for it a lot ‘cause she doesn’t always know what she’s doing. Tries, though. She’s a good kid. Love her.”

He sighed.

“…I love my sisters, Rossiu.”

Kittan jerked his head away, and Rossiu wanted to sit up and kiss him.

He wanted it only for a second, if that, and then felt himself swell with such awareness that he’d even thought of it that the only thing he could do was to choke it back down, stuff the thought so far away from view that he forgot it a moment later. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t.

When he’d calmed and forgotten, he reached over and placed his hand on Kittan’s knee. “I know you do.”

He thought, for possibly quite a while, that Kittan didn’t care or hadn’t noticed that he’d touched him, but just when he considered taking it away, he felt Kittan settle his hand right on top of his. He weaved their fingers together. He was still looking away. “You’re the only fuckin’ person who talks to me about this shit.”

Again, he fought not to sit up. He rolled onto his side to put his other hand on top of Kittan’s. Easing shut, his eyes lost their strength, and he couldn’t stop himself. His eyes were wet, and then his cheeks, and then the pillow, and the part of him that let it happen couldn’t be happier that he couldn’t picture Kittan inside Adai Village. It was not his place.


	11. 11

Rossiu’s last image of Kittan had been him sitting up, looking away, silhouetted against the dimming fire, and now Kittan was asleep beside him in the blankets, fully clothed like he’d fallen backwards without even knowing, one arm flopped across Rossiu’s chest and holding him still. Restrained from making even the slightest movement lest he rouse him, Rossiu tried to watch him while he slept. His eyes wouldn’t open all the way.

He had a headache. As soon as he had awakened enough to feel it, he shuddered and, with more than a bit of dismay, shut his eyes on reflex. He’d never had one like it before; it shot to the very front of his head like an arrow and throbbed there, precise, over his left eye. When it began to spread, stretching and creeping like veins, he felt his hand move, by instinct, beginning to lift to try to hold back the pain. It nudged against Kittan’s arm. But he couldn’t stop, and by the time his fingers touched his brow to shield against the light of the sunrise, Kittan had rolled onto his back with a groan and looked over at him.

Kittan yawned. “M- uh. M-mornin’.”

“G-good morning,” Rossiu muttered back, teeth clenched. He tried to open his eyes, but the headache had already seeped down behind them like some kind of swelling venom.

“…You okay?” Kittan asked. Rossiu felt him sit up, the blankets shifting along with him. An upsurge of cold whooshed inside in his place.

Rossiu clung to the blanket, pulling it close to his chest. He shook his head. The scraping of his skin and hair against the cloth echoed and sent the headache throbbing anew.

After a stretch, Kittan inched the rest of the way out of the blankets and knelt beside them. “Ahh, shit,  _this_. I shoulda said something, but you just passed out.”

The moment Rossiu reached to pull the blanket up over his face, the pain swelled all over. It at least no longer sent sharp pulsations of pain to little pinpricks, but thumped dull like a wave everywhere. He tucked his head down and didn’t realize until the blanket covered his whole head that his hand had curled up and rested by his chin, and that Kittan had pulled the blanket into place for him.

“I shoulda warned you, ugh, I’m sorry,” Kittan said. He’d either dropped his voice to just above a whisper or gotten up and walked a ways away; regardless, Rossiu found it much better on his ears. “If you, like—I dunno. That plant I gave you, even if it doesn’t totally fuck you up, it can give you a mean headache. It’s not the worst it can do, but…Shit, I’m sorry, Rossiu.”

Rossiu took a deep breath and rolled onto his stomach. His hand flopped onto the spot Kittan had vacated a moment earlier, leaving it warm. “I-It’s fine.”

Kittan grumbled something to himself; Rossiu heard him walking through the sand, only a few steps. He’d slept in his boots. “I’m gonna go get us some food, try to find you some plants and shit, but if I don’t, uh…I dunno, we’ll stop somewhere as soon as we can, I guess. I don’t want you eating anything that’s gonna make you sick. Not anymore. You gonna be okay?”

He nodded.

“Here.”

Squinting, Rossiu pulled the blanket down just far enough to let himself peek over the hem. There, Kittan was bent over, arrows slung onto his shoulder, holding his bow in one hand and a canteen out in the other just within Rossiu’s reach. “Drink some water,” he said. “And try to get back to sleep. Sometimes you just gotta sleep shit off.”

Rossiu held onto the canteen like it was a doll. He took a few long, slow sips, pulled the blanket back over his head, clutched it to his chest, and listened while Kittan walked off into the distance, the sand crunching and scattering under his boots. He’d find something. The deeper Rossiu buried his face in the dark, the less the headache bothered him. He couldn’t tell if it had actually soothed, or if he’d merely fallen back to sleep.

He wondered why Kittan had slept there with him. Maybe, in a way, he had known Rossiu would get that headache, but in the sleepy haze of dawn, he’d forgotten, but Rossiu scolded himself for the selfishness of it. He probably really had just slumped over. He supposed it didn’t matter. He kept his arm stretched out to drape it over the warm spot, just as Kittan had let his arm lay on top of him. Rossiu had very scrawny arms. Bony shoulders. His headache wafted away with his consciousness, and his last thought before falling back to sleep, as the sunlight darted into the pores of the blanket’s stitching, was that he could dissolve into that pile of fabric, fade away but never truly disappear, add to it, become a part of it, and it a part of him, just cloth, Rossiu, and that which had once held Kittan, all combined, and he didn’t remember dreaming in the extra hour he slept.

It was brighter when he woke up again. From the little he’d seen of the sky before wincing and hiding himself from the light, Rossiu had known it had been very, very early. The sun had just begun to peek over the canyons in the distance, and the ground and the clouds both were a dull shade of lavender; only the canyons so far away had fenced them off from blending into one another. Now, when he pulled the blanket away from his face, it was all the light blue of the early, but defined, day; the sky glowed off in the horizon as if one massive white stratus cloud lay over some distant part of the world and covered it for miles and miles like the outstretched leaves of a tree. Smoke coiled up into the air just before Rossiu’s eyes to break up the azure-white monotony, and he followed it down to its source.

The gray flank of a grapehippo sat over the fire. Holding one of the fruits of the animal in his lap, trying to peel away the skin, Kittan sat just where he’d settled the night before. Rossiu blinked away the last vestiges of migraine and recited the prayer quietly, refusing to muffle the words into the pillow, and heard Kittan join in at, “amen.”

Later in the day, while they rode the nakibashiri further south after a barely-won fight with a gunmen that leapt toward them from the top of a rock arch, Kittan leaned forward, apparently just to lean his elbows on the animal’s back, and asked, “You got a lotta prayers for stuff in your village?”

“There is a prayer for nearly every occasion,” Rossiu answered, quite before he even truly registered that he’d been asked. There had to come a point when he would have talked about Adai Village enough that there was nothing more to say. He thought it would have arrived a long time ago. “…We have many that we say at funerals. But we have prayers for weddings, and for the birth of a child, and a prayer for every time we eat. And we have some just for little things, like candlelight, or the bats. There are many prayers.”

Kittan paused. Then, pushing himself away from Rossiu’s back, away from the nakibashiri, he snickered. “What a dumb fuckin’ question, huh? You guys ran offa that religion of yours, ‘course you were gonna have prayers for everything.”

The speed with which he moved away made Rossiu jolt, himself. “It’s not a dumb question at all,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”

He felt Kittan lean back behind him, ease up, and chuckle.

For days, spans of hours went by in comfortable silence. They rode together and nothing more. Rossiu steered the nakibashiri in a straight line under the archway of the sun, and Kittan leaned in and out and back and forth with his hands around Rossiu’s waist, anchored to him like a heliotrope burying its roots underground to follow without falling over. Sometimes their shared cloak’s hood blew off in the wind and neither of them bothered to put it back in place.

During the silence, when the hood came off, Rossiu watched the landforms all around. Ever since the volcanic neck, he paid attention. There were spires, arches, wide canyons, and broad white playas that he never could believe were all made of the same basic substances. All just rocks; ground to a powder in the sand or compressed into mountains far off. Cacti dotted the hills and brush affixed the sand in place. The sun hit the cracked expanse beyond and sent it glowing. Rossiu had to tuck his head back down into the cloak just to refresh his sight. The desert stretched out across forever. The Father had never mentioned the Holy Lands as a hot place, or a dry one, or one so empty except for the dull oases hiding here or there. If he’d been to the surface, as Rossiu had been so rebellious to imagine, he came back with either a lie or a strange idea of paradise. At least there was room to move.

But Rossiu seized every opportunity he could to break the silence. When he had a question, he asked. Kittan had never once protested about it.

 “Is it all like this?”

“What, is it all—is it all desert?” Kittan asked.

“Yes,” he said, letting his eyes follow a mesa just far enough away that it would be an inconvenience to try to stop there. “Is everything like this?”

“Most of it,” he answered, shrugging. “We’ve been all over the place. There’s lots of stuff, but most of what we’ve seen is all, y’know, desert like this.”

Rossiu turned back forward when they passed out of range of the mesa. Only sand lay ahead. “What else is there?”

Kittan stretched back and let out a sigh. “All sorts of shit. Like—shit, when we first came up and decided to move around, we just thought it was gonna be desert for fuckin’ ever. It was all we saw for, shit, I don’t know how long. Months, probably. Thought the world didn’t end. But then we found this, like—we thought it was a lake, at first, only it was huge. Just this giant—water. There was this little village inside this cave right next to it and the people there said it was called the ocean. It was all sunny, too, we went and swam. Fuckin’ fun. Been back a few times. But goddamn, you should see it, I can’t even describe it. I’m a piece of shit at describing this typa stuff, I’m sorry. It’s just…It’s huge, I can’t even believe it.”

A giant lake. The ocean. Rossiu tilted his head back and got a clear view of the underside of Kittan’s chin, and he looked right back out ahead. If Kittan hadn’t been able to conceive of such a thing, there was no way Rossiu would. He tried to picture a vast body of water and went back, again and again, to the pond in which the Face-God rested. He sighed. “What else is there?”

There were trees, Kittan said—endless colonies of thick trees through which he and his sisters had had to navigate slowly and carefully. They were called forests. The leaves filtered the sunlight into weak polka-dots on the ground, nighttime at noon. And there were mountains that reached so high into the sky their peaks dissolved into clouds. Their paths were covered in feet of cold white dust that melted to water in the palms of their hands. The people of the cismontane villages called it snow. There were rolling plains covered in flowers, waterfalls that spilled into hidden ponds where the forests and the mountains met, cliffs from which they could have jumped into an angrier stretch of the sea, moors covered in mist and speckled with hedgerows like long-abandoned ships in a harbor. And even the desert, for all its arid endlessness, had moments and structures so beautiful they almost didn’t belong. There were other planets all on one continent. So much other than desert, and everything took up so much space, everything was so vast and beautiful, even if Kittan sputtered and gave up in the middle of fumbling his way through the images. Rossiu tried, but couldn’t conceive of such enormity. He wondered how, on a mass of land so infinite, Kittan and his sisters had ended up in that one particle of it, on that day, when Rossiu happened to be there as well. Coincidence, he’d always known, was never logical. He rode forth and wondered how far they were from the border of another world.

Gunmen attacks shrank to little more than rude interruptions of conversations that spanned days. He looked at each when they dropped in and announced themselves as if they’d cut him off, and he tended to them as they deserved. Kittan did the same. Rossiu wanted to find it suspicious that the enemies seemed so much weaker now.

“We’re just gettin’ better,” Kittan said.

But in the interest of what the two of them agreed to call convenience—“in case a gunmen attacks before we wake up”—they took to gathering their blankets into one large pile and sleeping, they assumed accidentally, in each other’s arms. Rossiu could never impose such contact on Kittan willingly.

Rossiu would wake up first and see Kittan before him, as quiet in his sleep as he was loud in his waking hours. He’d smile to himself. Before Kittan could wake up, Rossiu would lay his hand over Kittan’s and weave their fingers together, and then close his eyes and move in closer. Sometimes he actually fell asleep again. Sometimes he just pretended. Usually he just zoned out, listening to the wind blow soft over the sand. Always he wondered how he could possibly be so at ease letting so much of his body touch another person’s, when in Adai nothing of the sort would ever have even happened even if it were allowed.

The air came in cool little curlicues that only made Rossiu shiver if he hadn’t gotten close enough to Kittan. When he couldn’t feel the breeze anymore, then he knew he was comfortable.

He woke up the morning after their fourth day of travel and felt Kittan’s hand on his hip first before realizing his nose was moving away from his hairline. Kittan stuttered a good morning and asked him how much longer he thought it would be until they made it back to Adai, his voice low and tight, as if he asked because it had been written on some checklist he, himself, hadn’t prepared.

“Six more days,” Rossiu answered.

“Good.” Kittan rolled onto his back and brought his hand with him, resting it on his own stomach. He stared up at the sky. “Good.”

Right around noon the next day, they came across the canyon in which they’d previously camped for four days and decided to just relax. Rossiu noticed they’d been slowing the nakibashiri with each passing day; its bouncy sprint had petered to a trot. Meanwhile, Kittan’s eyes seemed more sunken than usual. Rossiu slid off the nakibashiri the second they arrived at the spot they’d once called a base, and ended up nearly eye-level with him

“You look tired,” he said. “Would you like me to try to hunt?”

“Nah, s’okay,” Kittan shook his head, rubbing his hand down the side of his face. He swung around and stepped off, swallowing some desperately-needed air. “Let’s set up first, then we’ll worry about food. I ain’t even that hungry yet.”

Rossiu backed away from the subject. Eager to help however he could, though, while Kittan gathered twigs and vagrant tumbleweeds for a fire later on, Rossiu dragged the blankets from the saddlebags and arranged them in a snug lump by the side of the lake. He bent down to sweep some earthy detritus from the blankets. Brushing against the side of his boot was a familiar green leaf.

“Kittan,” he said, spinning around to approach him. He held it in between his fingers like a tiny fan with which he hoped to brush away a molecule or two of the pervasive heat all around. “Look.”

Kittan dropped his armful of desiccated plants into the center of a ring of stones and wheeled around. He squinted. “Oh, shit, where’d you find that?”

“Right here.” Rossiu pointed at the ground. “Kittan, may I…”

He flinched when Kittan plucked it away, fingers brushing against fingers, and held it up to his eyes to inspect it more closely. “Yeah, that’s it, alright. This shit. What’s up?”

“U-um,” Rossiu held his hands together at his chest, wringing them, massaging his knuckles as if they’d been wounded. Kittan didn’t look back down at him, but kept the herb up so it must have blotted out the sunlight, and he studied it. He could have memorized the junctures and turns of all the veins.

It was only in these sorts of times that Rossiu ever felt so acutely aware of how he felt about Kittan. In the silence, when he could see him, and watch him, and there was no conversation to distract him. When Rossiu could see Kittan and focus on him, undeterred, he felt himself squirm, only on the inside, a worm grown too fat to fit through its old hole. Left with a void in which he could recall the essence, if not the exact words, of everything Kittan had ever said to him, Rossiu tried to focus on simply the sight of him, but it made him bite his lip and shrink back, shoulders shrugged. He bathed in him until he drowned. He took a deep breath and exhaled in one great bubble to let himself float back up to the surface.

“…May I ask what exactly it does if you don’t eat it…Properly?” he asked.

Kittan threw his head back with an incredulous guffaw. “Haha, oh, shit.” He gave the herb back to Rossiu and, with one hand covering his eye and the other on his hip, he kept his head back up toward the sky and shook it.

“Makes you see shit that ain’t there,” he began. He dropped to the ground and started looking around, searching for more. “Hallucinate. You freak the fuck out, it feels like shit. Crazy good for if you got a stomach ache, you know that. It’s good to have around, but goddamn. I was the first one of us who ever took it, before we figured out how it, like, works. We were in this village and this old lady, this medicine woman or whatever she wanted to—I dunno, call herself, gave it to me ‘cause I felt like I was gonna die. She even told me. I was a dumbass, though.”

For a moment, Kittan trailed off to lift up the corner of the blanket, find nothing, put it back down, and sit on it. “What did she say?” Rossiu asked.

Kittan patted the blanket next to him, and Rossiu sat beside him. “Ah, just, fuckin’, y’know, ‘Only chew it, don’t swallow the damn leaves, idiot’ and I went, ‘fuck that, I’m ‘bout to die,’ and just,” he clamped his hand around his wide-open mouth. “ _Om._ Ate the shit out of it. Bet I didn’t even chew, what a class act, huh? And then I was seein’ colors and shapes I didn’t even know about and everybody looked like they were melting, it was the scariest shit I’ve ever goddamn seen. Everyone sounded just…Evil. I don’t even know. Guess I passed out, ‘cause all I remember after that is wakin’ up with Kiyoh hoverin’ over me and I had this headache that ‘bout made my head explode. We figured out how to do it right after that, but sometimes it still—y’know, you can’t always swallow right.” He paused; his face twisted and he looked away. “I-I mean, it happened to Kinon by accident one time. Just…It—she ate it on accident, was all, and she lost her shit. I was scared to fuckin’ death for her. Never wanted that shit to happen to her. She won’t touch the stuff anymore. I don’t blame her.”

He started to turn back. Silent, he never turned the full way back around, though, and Rossiu saw his jaw move as he chewed on the inside of his mouth.

Part of Rossiu supposed it was only natural for Kittan’s thoughts to turn to his sisters so often. They’d been his only companions for years, and even before their arrival on the surface, they’d been so close Rossiu nearly couldn’t imagine. But when Kittan spoke of them, especially now that they’d separated, he had this faint strain in his voice as if he tried to call out to them just by saying their names, and they’d hear him and come rushing back to his side, whooping and trilling on their woolly mounts.

“You miss your sisters, don’t you?” Rossiu asked.

Kittan nodded. “Like crazy.”

“They’re fine. I know they are.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I ain’t worried about ‘em. I ain’t ever had to, they never give me a reason to worry about ‘em. Every time I think I gotta worry, they show right back up and they’re fine. I ain’t worried.”

But he still frowned. He just missed them. Rossiu looped his arm around Kittan’s. For a second, he was tempted to fall back onto the blankets and drag Kittan with him, just to lay there and watch the sky. He wondered if the girls could see the same clouds they could, wherever they were, north or west or east or—unlikely as it was—following them back south. Instead, he stayed still, and looked over at Kittan, who looked back at him.

“You said you’ve left them before,” Rossiu said. His fingers crept up to his lips. “When you were saying goodbye to Kiyal.”

“Never longer than, like, a night,” he said, reaching around to scratch the back of his neck. “I just gotta be alone sometimes.”

“Is it like how you go off to…Make yourself tired?” he put his other hand on top of the first, letting them both rest near Kittan’s elbow.

He nodded, but began to narrow his eyes and bob his head from right to left. “Sorta. I dunno. I just don’t wanna bother ‘em.”

A beat passed, and Rossiu debated asking further, but Kittan carried on just when he decided he would ask. “I just gotta go and think about home sometimes, y’know? ‘Cause they don’t ever talk about it. I don’t wanna make ‘em.”

Rossiu’s eyebrows rocketed up onto his forehead. “They don’t talk about Bachika?”

Kittan shook his head, but shrugged. “Used to. Long time ago. They got their reasons, I mean…Kiyoh had this little boyfriend, her first boyfriend, and he…Y’know. She was, like, thirteen, I thought she was never gonna get over it. But she’s one of these types—she—she can deal with shit. Got a good head on her shoulders, you know that. And then Kinon and Kiyal were littler, so they just—Mom and Dad and everything. I didn’t know what the fuck to do other than calm them all down. Make sure we were all okay. All that mattered. I dunno if they’re still scared shitless or if they’re, whatever, I dunno, past it, but I ain’t gonna bring it up either way. If they wanna talk, they’ll talk.”

He huffed out a sigh. Flicking the herb back onto the ground, he looked away, and Rossiu, again, had to bolt his legs in place so he wouldn’t sit up and do something he’d regret.

“Can’t believe you let me talk so much, goddamn,” Kittan muttered. “Blah blah blah. And you’re actually listening.”

Rossiu tilted his head. “Why wouldn’t I listen? If I ask a question, I’d like to hear the answer.”

Kittan grunted. He turned even further.

 _Actually listening._ Rossiu remembered all those days back when they’d first met, when he and Kittan and Kiyoh and Kinon and Kiyal raced across the desert, and they let him talk for hours about Adai and he’d never heard his voice before in such quantity. “I thought the same thing.”

Twitching his lips into a frown, Kittan looked back from the corner of his eye. “Huh?”

“When I would talk about my village. I thought one of you would tell me to stop eventually, but you never did,” he hung his head and peered into his lap, where he found his elbows bent, hands still locked around Kittan’s arm. The staircase down into Adai sent his sights dark, and he imagined walking back there, back home, with Kittan, like this, and as soon as he pushed the thought away and felt it drift lazily like a slowly deflating balloon, he smiled a tight, flat, Adai smile. “Thank you for letting me tell you about it.”

“No, well—it—y-you’re welcome,” Kittan turned his head and only faced forward to stare into his lap, as well. “I just don’t get why you give so much of a shit. Why you care, or whatever.”

Rossiu felt a cringe twist in his chest. “Why wouldn’t I care?”

Kittan only shrugged.

The two of them sat. Rossiu tried to pretend he was anybody else in the world, so that he could look at Kittan as somebody else, and determine how anybody could possibly not care about Bachika Village, or about how much Kittan loved his sisters, or just about Kittan. But he gave up; there, at that moment, he was Rossiu, and he cared about Kittan so much he couldn’t get the words into his throat past his swelling chest and heavy eyes. He breathed and let it all relax.

“I think you and I feel the same way about our villages,” Rossiu eased forward, letting his spine slump while he glanced around at the canyon walls, and at the tall grasses, stirring in the breeze.

“Howzat?” Kittan asked.

“It’s…” Rossiu supposed he hadn’t exactly pushed the thoughts into an order he could speak. A vague cloud of ideas hovered about and he decided, with a sigh, not to force them through a funnel to make them emerge in a neat line. He couldn’t worry about structure when something needed to be said. “…It’s like half our souls belong to our villages. Even though my village expelled me, and I can’t—I do not—I am—having some…Issue with our ways, and I’m not sure what it will be like when I go back, Adai Village is always going to be my home. It’s more than that, even, but I don’t…It—I just feel it. It is a part of me. And you feel the same way about Bachika Village. Even though it’s gone, it is your place, isn’t it?”

Kittan whirled his face back over to him so quickly his features were nearly stripped away in the wind. He didn’t speak.

Rossiu peeked back up at him and, keeping his mouth at a tight, faint smile, finished. “So…Of course I care.”

Kittan turned as slowly as Rossiu had ever felt, and put his other arm around him, leaving the first in place with Rossiu’s hands locked around it. His cheek sat against his forehead. Rossiu was pulled in so close that his lips almost touched the triangle of bare skin where Kittan wouldn’t button his shirt, and he sucked them in between his teeth as preemptive penance. Moving with such languor Rossiu missed when it began, Kittan rocked the two of them back and forth, trees against a gust. He could have fallen asleep. They still had five more days, alone together.

But after they left the canyon—after another two days, a night outside of Shoubou where Kittan said they’d really return when they were done, and another two days—Rossiu woke up alone. They’d settled in the darkness under an overhanging ledge, where the cold had permeated the blankets worse than usual the night prior. Kittan had held onto him with his whole body, telling him it was better for the both of them.

“Sorry about this,” he’d said.

“This feels fine,” Rossiu had replied. He’d shuddered at the touch at first, at the extent of it, but he’d eased into it so swiftly he couldn’t think why he would have ever turned it away. “V-very warm.”

Now he felt the cold before he opened his eyes. They’d arrive back in Adai Village the day after next, and Kittan was nowhere to be found.

He sat up and looked around, certain that in the dawn’s muddled blue Kittan had just gotten up early and went off to find food, but he saw nothing. He drew his knees close to his body and wrapped his arms around his legs, debating if he should go look or stay put and just hope. He couldn’t just call out for him, not if he was hunting, and definitely not if he wanted to risk alerting anything he’d regret.

Rossiu dropped back down onto the pillow as if his bones melted inside his skin. He wondered if Kittan would ever do to him what he’d done to his sisters so many times, just disappeared to have a moment alone. There certainly had been no Kamina this time, no Simon, so he wondered what he’d done to cause such an affront now. It had to have been something. Rossiu was sure he knew punishment when he felt it.

He tried to whistle only so he could hear himself fail. He didn’t deserve the talent.

Yet somehow he told himself to just be quiet. He made no sense. Kittan wouldn’t leave him like that. Wherever Kittan had gone didn’t matter; he’d be back. As long as Rossiu heard no sounds of struggle—which he was sure he would have heard if something had happened while he slept—there couldn’t possibly be a problem. Nothing would find them there, at that hour, in such light. He pulled the blanket over his chest, where his heart wouldn’t slow.

“Rossiu.”

His eyes opened while he rocketed up in his seat. Kittan had emerged from nowhere and stood with his hands in his pockets like he’d been there the whole time, like a ghost.

“C’mere,” he said.

So Rossiu picked himself up from the blankets and joined him. Kittan started walking off to the east as soon as he arrived.

Rossiu asked, “Where were you?” and looked away as soon as he heard the words fly from his mouth. He watched the stones on the ground brighten to an aquamarine glow, transfigured, it seemed, into gems.

“Check it out.”

He’d started to rub his eyes just before he looked up, and when he saw it, he let his hand drop to his side, still balled into a little fist.

The sun drifted upward behind a veil of wispy brushstroke clouds, a golden sphere eclipsed with stripes. On the surface of the miles of vacant desert before them, the light shined in the same pattern. The world adorned itself with white-blue face paint. The sky brought itself up to lilac and the ground followed, and all the while, Rossiu watched the gleaming orb rise, and forgot himself.

“I dunno,” Kittan said. Rossiu followed his grip on his hand up to his face, where he, too, stared out at the rising sun, fingering the backmost fringes of blond hair. “You think if you guys in your village ever saw somethin’ like this, you’d have a prayer for it?”

Kittan looked down at him, wrenching a grin into place as if he wasn’t sure how wide he thought it should go. He shrugged one shoulder. Rossiu’s instinct was to cling to his hand as he always did, anytime he thought Kittan needed it, but he stepped away from it. Kittan didn’t need it. Kittan, he knew, had done exactly what he’d planned on doing, regardless of how long he’d spent planning it. He couldn’t stammer through the image if Rossiu saw it himself. Rossiu pulled his hand away and brought it, with the other, to his chest, and weaved his fingers together.

“Go like this,” he said.

Kittan looked at his hands like they’d done something without his permission. With his elbows out to the sides, pointed like wings, he slammed his fingers into a locked position overtop one another. He stared down at them nearly cross-eyed.

“Here.” Rossiu reached up and pulled his elbows down, relaxing his arms, and shifted Kittan’s fingers just to ease them up against one another. No force necessary.

His teeth fighting not to devour his lips, Kittan watched him the whole time. When Rossiu abandoned his hands, now properly positioned, and put his own back into place, he mumbled, “Man, you got some tiny hands,” and punctuated it with a cough.

Rossiu glanced down at them; what about the size of them could make Kittan sound so embarrassed?

“S-so, what do I do?” Kittan asked. “Just, like…Do I say something?”

Adai had no sunrise prayer. No natural phenomenon of such scale, such color had ever fallen so gluttonous for punishment that it would creep down into Adai and become a thing of such wonder as to warrant a prayer. They prayed for lives. They prayed for necessities. They prayed for the things they wanted to keep around. They dragged the Face-God into it all, as if he had spit their livelihoods from his granite mouth.

Rossiu looked at his woven fingers and told Kittan, “Just enjoy it.” He couldn’t remember those three words in the sound of his voice. They stood together just like that and watched until the sky grew bright.

Two days later, they arrived in front of a hollow boulder in the middle of the sand. Side by side, they stared into the darkness, descending down for far longer than they could possibly estimate. With the nakibashiri standing guard outside at Kittan’s whistle, they looked at one another and back down into the shadows. They took the first step hand-in-hand. Behind them, the sun had retreated to the west and dropped below the line of the canyons and mountains, and they looked back up and saw the first stars peeking out of hiding in the deep cyan of twilight. The moon had waxed itself to near completion, and they told it goodbye for now.


	12. 12

The people of Adai Village had never heard sounds from the other side of the exit without an expulsion ceremony to precede them. They knew, though, once the boulder had been pushed back into place, the drowned cries of women calling out to their children; they knew the banging of mens’ fists and the vibrations against the stone all around them. They knew what desperation sounded like, desperation and regret.

An inquiring knock was a war siren. Preparations for the communal breakfast froze, ingredients clamped in hands to near-liquid. The children began to creep towards the boulder before the adults flanking them jerked them back. The women muttered amongst themselves, sure that someone in their midst had a clue. A few men ran for Father Magin. The knocks grew faster and harder and louder and left their patience behind until they stopped altogether and gave rise to the voices.

There were two of them, a lighter, softer one, and a throatier one. Without giving the signal to shuffle their feet, the villagers started sliding forth to listen. They evicted their voices until further notice. No one could make out a single word from the other side. The voices seemed neither to argue nor end their garbled phrases in upward inflections, asking one another questions. They merely spoke. The higher voice gave a definitive command, and the hall fell silent just as Father Magin approached.

“Open the pathway,” he said. “I will take over from there.”

The two men who thought themselves the best-built ran to the boulder and heaved it out of the way. From behind it, the softer voice gave a quiet yelp. The rolling of boulder against pebble-dotted rock, the sliding of stone, muted any other sound there could have been to hear.

Every Adai villager took a step back when Father Magin did. Parents lifted their children onto their shoulders to see. The elderly craned their necks around to squint into the shadows, old bones popping. The figure standing at the foot of the staircase had as good as reached down the throats of all of them to yank loose a gasp.

Magin’s poise flew free from him like a ghost abandoning a corpse. He strained to widen his eyes, only because it would keep his mouth straight.

“Rossiu!” he stammered, fingers twitching around the binding of the scriptures.

Rossiu tipped his head upward. His first breath of Adai air nearly made him gag. He and his lungs both had forgotten the blistering stagnancy of it all, the decrepit atmosphere and the colorless walls. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came forth. Beside him, Kittan did as he’d been told immediately before and let go of his hand. Rossiu shook an inch forward.

“Father,” he said. Once he allowed himself a moment to blink the sights back into his head, he could focus on him more clearly. The last time he’d looked around at his village, his home, he saw that same bursting glow of shock in the Father’s eyes. He wondered if he’d ever left, until he scanned the area and his eyes fell onto Kittan’s shadow. He could not reach back and grab Kittan’s hand again. Not here.

The mumbling of the villagers grew into a torrential drone. Rossiu heard his name amongst it. He knew the hiss. They remembered him, but when he looked around and surveyed the lot of them, he found them looking from one to another, as shocked as Magin, as if they’d never seen Rossiu before, or, if they had, he’d grown into a mutant effigy of the human form since then. They were the same people he’d always known.

“…No, Rossiu, this…” Magin shook his head, eyes locked onto Rossiu, as if he’d held a conversation with himself a moment earlier. “…How have you returned?”

Someone among the forty-nine beyond said in a voice clear as the daylight, “It  _is_  him! He’s returned!” and Rossiu felt himself jiggle and shrink at the whispers and hisses of his name, escalating towards an inevitable crescendo.

“Rossiu is back!”

“He survived the reunion with the face-gods!”

“They sent him back to us!”

“What if he was rejected?”

“This is a sign!”

“Father!”

“Rossiu survived!”

“Rossiu brings news from the gods!”

“Rossiu is our messenger! Rossiu is our savior!”

Father Magin only moved when the crowd headed in to loom over the three in the stairwell. He held his arms out to the sides and, with a breath, balled up his shock and sent it hurtling to the ground under his foot. “Keep yourselves calm. I will handle this.” His eyes had never left Rossiu, but he seemed then to target him more precisely than a second earlier. “Rossiu,” he said. “What is the meaning of this?”

Rossiu had moved an inch toward Kittan’s side. They’d ignored him. Kittan had always been safe. Rossiu looked up at him and Kittan returned the glance; he didn’t stand as tall as he usually did, keeping his spine straight enough to peacock his crown as a threat. He pushed his shoulders back and bent his arms, tightening his fists, attack-ready, and he stood that much ahead of Rossiu. Rossiu could not touch him to calm him.

Surrounding them, the villagers waited as silently as if they’d never opened their mouths to praise him. Rossiu, their savior. Their faith could only waver to such an angle. They watched him almost in tears.

He had no option but to mimic Magin and breathe deep, and allow himself that precious second to think of how to explain it all. For the whole ride, he’d come up with questions, not answers. Father Magin waited, far too patient, for Rossiu’s reply.

Rossiu at last settled on, “May we come in?”

Magin stood still, Rossiu thought perhaps not to debate whether to grant the request, but merely stunned at the simplicity of it. After a moment, he urged the villagers to move back and spread out, and signaled Rossiu and Kittan inside. Magin, it seemed, had nothing more to say.

And neither did Rossiu. He had assured himself that their arrival back in Adai would gravitate together like magnets, but they stood there, they all stood there, all fifty-two of them, in silence, waiting for someone, anyone, to say a single word—a salutation, a note of gossip from the Holy Lands, a parroted question that still had yet to receive an answer.

He saw faces he recognized, all in wonder. Names returned with each glance. He couldn’t look at any single individual for more than a moment; if he was no longer simply Rossiu, the apprentice of the priest, then were they the villagers of Adai? Who were these people? He flicked his eyes around to the walls. The walls, flat and white and solid, extended far higher than he ever remembered, but he supposed they hadn’t changed. The candles glowed against the surfaces with tiny fires that couldn’t have done any good to help the chill he felt about his shoulders. He hadn’t covered himself. They goggled at his shame, no doubt.

“W-we cannot stay long,” Rossiu murmured, finally. His voice, scarcely more than a hush, echoed from the wall to the dark, jagged floor. “We are here to seek the aid of the Face-God.”

The crowd raised its muttering voices in a chorus once more. They began to take note of Kittan, it seemed, as they pointed their fingers toward him and glanced among themselves to seek a consensus on his character. Rossiu looked up at him and found him studying the crowd in kind, and before he would allow them to awaken the ire that so consistently edged underneath his surface, Rossiu gestured toward him, fingertips brushing dangerously near the skin of his forearm. “This is Kittan. He is from another village. He is a very good friend of mine, so if it is not too much to ask, I hope you will treat him with all due respect.”

The murmurs only throbbed when Kittan raised his hand to give a weak, uncertain wave. Magin cleared his throat to silence them once more. “Rossiu.”

“Yes, Father?” he asked. He hadn’t heard his voice emerge in so familiar a fashion in weeks. He could no longer remember how much time had passed since his expulsion.

“I will need to speak to the two of you in private. Come with me.”

Father Magin had already turned and started to head through a path in the parting crowd before Rossiu turned to Kittan to consent. They followed behind him. To their sides, the eyes of each villager had opened so wide they could use them as mirrors as they passed. Between them, their hands swung like clumsy pendulums, fighting not to touch.

Rossiu looked over to watch Kittan for any reaction, but found him peering through the cracks in the throngs. He looked beyond the people. Rossiu, turning his neck this way and that, could manage to see it. The Face-God. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever registered just how well it blended into the rock wall to which it was apparently attached. All of it stood in the same dim, gray sort of featureless kind of granite. He pieced together its features as best he could; he remembered Lagann. A niggling whine that had insisted there was a possibility the Face-God was nothing more than a sculpture in the surface dissolved in a wave of flame that instant. The Face-God was old. Ancient. But it was not a sculpture. It was a gunmen, and Kittan would make it move before they left the confines of Adai Village, however long it took.

“Rossiu!” a voice gasped. “It really is you!”

“Why are you back?” asked another.

Rossiu looked down to his right. A redheaded boy had pushed through the crowd; his rose-haired sister, clinging to a ragdoll, had followed close behind.

“Gimmy. Darry. Leave them be. You may speak later,” Magin said. He neither looked back nor stopped.

Rossiu kept his eyes on the twins until they rounded the corner and the whole crowd fell out of sight. Spoiled as ever, he thought, orphans, heirs to a mass of villagers willing to contribute to their survival in some way or another, even if they did it behind their own backs. Scraps of leftovers and shabby hand-me-downs added up in the long run. No one shamed themselves in private for indulging Gimmy and Darry; no one knew everyone else provided for them, as well. Rossiu wanted to take a step back and tell them he’d be right back. But he, Kittan, and Magin stepped into the shadows and Kittan seized him by the wrist, still walking, still looking forward, until they arrived at the entrance of Magin’s quarters. In the candlelit second before Father Magin turned around, Kittan let go. Rossiu lost his chance to scold him for it before he could even reject the opportunity on his own.

Only once inside Magin’s quarters did Rossiu let his body shiver. The heat on the surface vanished along the way down the staircase; Adai Village was at once far colder and just as pleasingly cool as he’d ever remembered it. He’d be comfortable in his old poncho, all warm and modest. He held onto his shoulders. One strap of his black shirt had fallen lopsided and he flicked it back into place. His attire, he knew, had no trace of suitability down here, in the presence of the High Priest, in the room he’d spent hours every day, for years, musing on the calculations of the divine. When the Father turned to him, he didn’t know how he could forego mention of Rossiu’s abandonment of his shame.

“It has been over a month since you were chosen, Rossiu,” Magin said, fighting through a tremor in his voice. “How have you returned?”

“I did not die, Father.” The words popped out of his mouth like seeds squeezed from a fruit. He felt his eyes widen. Keep going. Always keep going. “When I climbed the stairs, I did not die. I came to the surface and—it was a place. It was just a place. I stayed in a cave. I almost ran out of supplies. I  _almost_  died. Kittan saved my life, he and his sisters. They live there now, on the surface. But I never died.”

“I beg your pardon?” Magin gawked at Kittan. “How so?”

“I was attacked. By a face-god,” Rossiu stated. He quivered at the enunciation of it. “But Kittan saw, and he saved me. Father, the surface is not heaven. It is not a holy place.”

Father Magin set the scriptures on his desk with a sigh. He sat back in his chair. “I am glad you said nothing of this to the people. They would never be able to accept what you are telling me.”

 Such stride. Almost as a natural reflex, Rossiu replied, “I wouldn’t have, either.” He hung his head while Magin shook his own.

Rossiu could not think any of the questions he’d aggregated over the last ten days could possibly be suitable to fill the silence that fell. They were too intrusive now. Magin had looked at him with such shock when he’d arrived, the same shock as when he’d left, the very same. His composure blasted away into the ether, he looked to Rossiu with questions of his own, and he couldn’t bring himself to dishonor him by asking anything. Magin always wielded the authority. Rossiu tried to part his lips to speak and shut it at the megaton insurrection that threatened to burst through.

And then Father Magin looked at Kittan. “You are from the surface?”

“Uh,” Kittan, straightening himself up, seemed to have forgotten he was there with them. Rossiu heard him fumble for the—quite simple—answer, and shied into himself even further. Anytime Kittan grew quiet, comfort had to fall away as well. “Y- well, kinda. It’s like Rossiu said, me and my sisters live there. Been livin’ there about three years now, I guess. But I’m from Bachika Village, originally.”

He spoke clearly to get in Magin’s graces. Rossiu could hear. He took his time to enunciate. He didn’t sound quite right without tripping over his own tongue.

“We call people from the Holy Lands messengers,” Magin said. “You are the ones closest to the gods, those who dwell on the surface. Your knowledge far surpasses ours.”

Kittan looked to Rossiu for some kind of signal, barely keeping himself from shrugging, and Rossiu heard the crowd shouting from before,  _Our savior!_  Kittan was no angel and Rossiu was no savior. What could they possibly do, this very moment, to deliver Adai Village from the misery into which it had sunk so long ago? They came here for answers and for a chance to shuffle an inch towards the future. “They are human beings,” he said. “They took care of me, and protected me, and brought me with them while they traveled, and…We met others. Kittan and I decided to come back. It is very important, but we cannot stay long.”

“Why have you returned?” Magin asked. “I cannot believe you have survived. This…You, of all of us…Rossiu…How could you have survived?”

“I told you already. I did not die.”

“I am not blind, Rossiu. You are standing here before me.”

Such stride.

Rossiu narrowed his eyes at the Father. Now, with the heat in his chest rising to knock into his brain the ease with which Magin had taken the news of the surface’s absence of sanctity, he could ask. He needed to ask now.

“…Father Magin, do you know how dangerous it is up there?”

He shut his eyes. “They have yet to judge your soul. They sent you with an angel to await your fate.”

 _Now_. If the Father planned to just sit and toy with Rossiu’s intellect for the rest of the visit, he had his answer. Let the people call him a savior while he continued to take him for a loyal simpleton. Rossiu would play along no more. He clenched his fists.

“…Father Magin,” he said. “You have been to the surface.”

Magin looked up at him with his eyes jittering like a trapped insect. “I am alive, Rossiu. I have not been to the surface.”

“I am not a fool, Father!” When he stepped forward, he saw Kittan’s shadow back away, and he heard his voice rebounding from one wall to the other, from the floor to the ceiling. He couldn’t even try to hide in it. It stuck to him with every reverberation and he carried on. “I am alive, as well. You have been to the surface! You know how dangerous it is up there. You know how likely it is for people to die. You know the face-gods are the ones doing the killing! Why would you send us to the surface?”

Father Magin blinked once, slowly, and took a breath. He held his forehead in his hand, the loser. “…A swift death at the hands of a face-god on the surface is far more desirable than a slow, agonizing one while our God sits and watches. It is a release from the pain of living down here. You understand, don’t you?”

Rossiu’s eyes had grown watery. He fought to make himself speak, to call it a mercy killing to Father Magin’s face, but he couldn’t shut his brain off. Magin would call it a reward. And if every evictee from Adai Village had been lucky enough to be found by the Black Siblings, he supposed he couldn’t call it a mercy killing. Rossiu took a sharp breath.

He would continue in spite of understanding. “…Father, when did you go to the surface?”

Magin ran his hand over his slicked, white hair. In some realm of recognition, Rossiu wondered what color it had been when he departed for heaven. “I traveled to the surface on several occasions. I was quite young the first time. Older than either of you, I’d say, but quite young.”

“Why did you go?”

“I had to know,” he was no longer looking at Rossiu, or even giving Kittan a surreptitious, distant glance. He looked into his lap, where his other hand rested, opening and closing, opening and closing, over and over. “I wanted to learn what was up there, if it was any different from what we went through down here. It was a very vain gesture of me. A vain thing to want. But I was at my most vain then, I suppose.”

Rossiu felt the air around his shoulders. He’d let go of them long ago and still stood on the same ground. He knew the sermon. He couldn’t remember ever hearing the father speak of his youth before. There had never come a time when Rossiu had sat and tried to picture him as a child, or even as a young man. He’d always been old, it seemed, older even than it seemed he should have been, as if his body had taken the initiative to age him quicker than his mind could catch up, or that Magin had lived generations before he’d been born. Regardless, he’d always just  _been_. Rossiu had never known how to describe it. And now Magin sat before him looking down at his own hand, just watching as it opened and closed like a flower, aware. He’d lived many more lifetimes than just his own, and his body had long since begun to let it show. Rossiu watched the gravity pull him down.

“Is that where you found the scriptures?” he asked.

Father Magin closed his hand. “Yes.”

“If it is not too much to ask,” Rossiu backed away. Distance, here would be preferable, for the Father, at least. He stepped into Kittan’s shadow and let it camouflage him. “I would very much like to know about it all.”

“And I would like to know what business you have back here in our village,” Magin said, turning his gaze back on Rossiu. “I need to know how to explain to our people your presence here. What is this aid you require of the Face-God?”

With everything from the Father’s mouth, Rossiu wanted to turn to Kittan and beg him to say something. He tilted his head back to look up at him. Kittan twisted his lips and knitted his brows.

It was Rossiu’s fault, really.  _Just let me talk. I know them._ Kittan had to have been waiting for Rossiu to say anything, say something, the right thing. Everything. Rossiu shook. He had nothing to say, no ideas. Nothing. He’d led the way right into a corner lined with razorblades.

He didn’t realize Kittan had looked away from him until he heard him speak. “So, these face-gods. You know what they really are?”

Magin paused, again it seemed simply to absorb the direction down which he’d been guided to travel. “I beg your pardon?”

“Well, did you ever figure out what they actually are, when you were on the surface?” Kittan asked. “Or do you totally think they’re, like—some kinda—actual gods?”

Father Magin did not, and could not, say a word.

Rossiu turned to stand in between the two other men, Magin to his left and Kittan to his right. He never moved his eyes from Kittan, in wait for him to peer back at him.

When he finally did, his eyes glinted with just the kind of confident affirmative he wouldn’t have expected from anyone less than Kamina himself. Kittan, impartial but no less sensitive, could explain far better than Rossiu, in all his bleary-eyed daze.

“We call ‘em gunmen up there,” he began. “They’re these giant robots. Mecha. Big things made outta metal, they’re, like—weapons, but you can ride around in ‘em. Look like big ugly heads. S’all they are. They’re controlled by these guys called beastmen. Ugly sonsabitches. Don’t know if they wanna be people or animals. They’re up there tryin’ to kill any humans they find on the surface, and sometimes they don’t even wanna stop there. They see signs of a village, they’re gonna destroy it. Good thing you guys are so far down, I don’t think they’d find you. But that’s what they are. And me and Rossiu, we…We met these guys up on the surface who found a way to take these things, use ‘em, so they can take down whoever’s in charge of all this. We’re tryin’ to help ‘em out. I think you might be able to help us out, y’know. Help yourself. I don’t want what happened to my village to go down here.”

Anytime Kittan spoke, Rossiu listened to every word, no matter how rough or mangled. With this, though, he saw a bright, but amorphous tiny blob in the distance of where, perhaps, they could go with this.

The Father still had nothing he could add. He gave Kittan the time he needed to grin before continuing. “Rossiu told me all about this place, how you guys got that ceremony and everything, how he got kicked out. It’s sorta bullshit, y’know, but I’m—like—I think maybe you guys are on to something, kinda. Even if the surface is a shithole, all these gunmen runnin’ around, it’s got—there’s—some pretty good parts in it. Maybe not heaven like you guys think it is, but—it—there’s…ahh,” he grunted. Eyes back on Rossiu, he seemed to have lost his train of thought.

Rossiu could reroute it. “We want to take back the surface and make it a place for all of us to live. We wouldn’t have to live according to all these rules.”

For a long, long while, almost long enough that Rossiu was sure he’d only hear Magin tell them to leave when he finally opened his mouth to speak, no one said a word. The Father spent the whole interlude processing it, keeping his eyes on anything but Rossiu and Kittan.

“I cannot say I can fulfill whatever you request of me, but…” Father Magin paused almost as if he regretted answering to begin with. “What do you need?”

“The Face-God,” Rossiu answered. “It is a gunmen.”

“Absolutely not.”

Rossiu’s jaw dropped, and every bit of the civility with which Kittan had conducted himself fell to the floor right alongside it. “What?” Kittan hollered. “How th- what’re you talkin’ about?”

“I cannot allow you to take the Face-God,” Magin said. He pushed himself from his chair to his feet. “The possibility of success for this plan of yours is far too low. If you take it and fail, we will have nothing. Rossiu, you of all of us should know what the Face-God means to our people. It is necessary to our survival.”

“B-but Father!” he cried. For a moment Rossiu wondered just how long it would take for his body to regroup, to gravitate back together; every cell had ripped away from its neighbor, and he tingled everywhere, incomplete and hovering by some kind of membrane to barely retain his shape. He couldn’t speak for shaking.

“So you’re just gonna—you’re tellin’ us you’re not even gonna try?” Kittan barked. “That thing ain’t gonna help anybody if you’re just keepin’ it down here! It ain’t gonna protect you if you leave it alone!”

The Father picked up the scriptures from his desk and headed toward the doorway. “If you truly want to reclaim the surface, I am sure you will find a way. But I cannot allow you to take the Face-God.”

Rossiu’s head swelled for a portion of a second with a hot swirl that blinded him. He spoke before he knew he could gulp his words back down, if he’d only had the resolve. “It’s all a lie, Father! You’ve been lying to all of us!”

Father Magin looked down at Rossiu with his hand on the surface of the door. He’d always been able to collect himself so quickly and so firmly that he seemed to lithify. He had eyes made of solid rock, and they fell on Rossiu to crush every brittle little bone in his body. “Calm yourself. I do not think I can allow you two to stay.”

“That’s how it works, huh?” Kittan snarled. At some point, while Rossiu was struggling to collect himself from his outburst and blush scarlet at the thought of it, he’d stepped in front of him, and when Rossiu looked up, he saw only Kittan’s back while he stared Magin down. “Kickin’ us out so you can keep right on lyin’ to your villagers, just like you kicked them out? Rossiu and his mom? Not even gonna try to really fix shit for yourself when you have a chance? You don’t give a shit about ‘em, do you?”

Magin’s eyes narrowed so slightly not even a mote of dust traveling before them would have shifted its course in its wake.

“ _Never_ ,” he said. “Imply that I do not care for the welfare of my villagers.”

He pulled the door open and stepped aside, holding his hand out to usher them through the threshold. “Please leave. I have to sort out this business now.”

Rossiu watched Kittan and Magin attempt to one-up each other with glares for what could have been years. Expelled. Again. He had floated away. He felt his own yell still in his throat, bouncing around, drying it out, making it rattle and echo, but he couldn’t remember it coming from his mouth, or the sound of his voice. The basest instinct ate him alive and now it chewed on the remains. He couldn’t move. His whole face was still hot, but slowly, with the pressure draining from his temples, he heard Kittan scoff. A jerk of his body hold him Kittan had seized him by the wrist and pulled him forward, one disobedient yank. Rossiu hung his head. The prospect of looking up at Father Magin as they walked through the doorway made his stomach lurch, but his neck betrayed him. He turned and gazed upward, and as rigid as the earth, Magin looked down at him from the shadow of his brow. If he left Adai Village now, sans the closure of answers, he would take the judgment with him as his souvenir.

“This is a safety precaution,” Father Magin said.

“It’s  _bullshit,_ ” Kittan replied.

And Rossiu just let his hair hang like a bridal veil to hide his face.

“Father Magin has spoken to them!”

Rossiu nearly collided into Kittan when he heard it. He hadn’t realized he’d stopped. There were murmurs again, growing louder and louder, slowly. He lifted his head, and when his hair parted to reveal the view before him, his fingers wrenched back to paralyze into claws.

All the villagers of Adai stood before the two of them, holding plates of food and dragging jugs of water, and Gimmy and Darry stood at the front of the crowd with bundles of white cloth in their hands. And then the cries erupted.

Our savior, again. Our savior, our messengers. They came with offerings. They could only have finished preparing it so quickly if they had deities to appease.

“Rossiu!” they bellowed. “Kittan!”

Rossiu looked first to Kittan, who stared out at all of them with his eyebrow twitching. All the times he’d visited villages as the leader of the Black Siblings, he could never have been greeted as a demigod. The mob pulsated forward to crowd around them, holding out the food and the water and the gifts. They looked into the faces of the two of them and begged, without words, for answers their High Priest, even with all his dedication to the theology of all they could and couldn’t see in their confines, would never have been able to answer. They needed it straight from the source.

Looking back over his shoulder at Magin, Rossiu found him just a head bobbing lonely and distance above the masses, shocked once more. He tried to step through them after a moment, forging a path. Once or twice he opened his mouth to speak, but Rossiu couldn’t tell whether he’d actually spoken and merely dropped it or if his voice had been hushed by the clamor.

He’d forgotten what an excitable place Adai Village was.

He would only wrestle his wrist free of Kittan’s grip in an emergency. When he’d broken loose, as if snapping through a rope, he held his hands out to his sides. One palm touched a man’s chest. Rossiu didn’t budge. The crowd, as a whole, backed away to let a ring grow on the floor around Kittan and Rossiu, at their feet.

“Everyone!” he cried. “Please be calm!”

They were silent.

But one shuffling noise began to rouse through the crowd, one little scrape after another. Rossiu turned his head in its direction and found Gimmy jumping up and down in place, waving the white cloth he’d brought in his hands like a weapon. Darry stood still beside him and, with her ragdoll tucked into one arm, held her own cloth out toward him.

“Rossiu,” she said, peering at him from over the black ear of her doll. “We have presents for you.”

“What’s it like in the Holy Lands?” Gimmy asked. “Are you friends with all the face-gods?”

He couldn’t even get his hands to drop. He’d frozen at the sight of them.

Only a month earlier he would have had instant clearance to turn to Father Magin and request counsel for how to reply. Now Rossiu languished in place, silent, and watched in his head as all the sights of the surface receded from view. He may have dreamt them, had Kittan not stood behind him, barely touching his body to his, only the resonant warmth from his being proof that he existed at all and was there with him. If he could move, if he could turn and gaze up at Kittan, he was sure he’d remember all he’d experienced on the surface.

Kittan wobbled in place just then, perhaps unsure of what to do with his body. The fabric of his pants brushed against Rossiu’s shoulder and sent the strap of his shirt flopping down to rest somewhere halfway down Rossiu’s upper arm. Reflexive, he moved to pull his strap into place to save his arm from the tickle. Clumsy and uncertain, Kittan was right there, the realest thing Rossiu could make his head understand. He felt the skin of his shoulder.

He turned around to look at Magin once more. The Father was moving away from the wall adjacent to the door of his quarters, moving his hand away from his forehead. His eyes met with Rossiu’s. His shoulders slumped an inch after he sighed in his direction.

Underground, Rossiu could do nothing. The universe continued to direct him toward his punishment. Absolve yourself, it said. You called an honest man a liar. He gives them what they want. You are their savior. He tried and couldn’t snub their logic. His hands dropped to his sides.


	13. 13

The last time Rossiu wore one of those ponchos, the Adai standard, he hadn’t yet met Kittan. He’d barely allowed himself to gaze around at the land beyond a dark cave. He nestled into it and hid. How he’d relapsed.

He and Kittan sat beside each other on the floor, their backs to the wall, each with thick white fabric draped around their shoulders. The villagers had crowded them into the corner to feed them. They only nibbled. Too many eyes on them, waiting for them to explain their business beyond Magin’s words—“They believe the Face-God holds an answer for them. They may stay to explore this hunch.” The Father had disappeared. He retreated to the comfort of his quarters the moment the masses of Adai spelled in clear words they would not let them go. Meditation, he’d said. He wouldn’t speak to them.

Playing it off as manners, that he wouldn’t speak with his mouth full, Rossiu said nothing to Kittan, and Kittan spoke just as much. In the flickers of seconds during which Rossiu obliged himself to look up from his plate, he peeked up at Kittan and caught him eyeballing the villagers while they did the same to him. Occasionally their eyes met, pleading for help, an end to the agony of discomfort. Rossiu couldn’t help but note how awful Kittan looked in white. Wrong, it was all wrong. He took tiny bites of his mushrooms just to give his body something to do other than see and process. Feel, he needed to just feel, the food in his mouth, something inside of him. He hadn’t eaten in longer than it seemed. A century ago would have been close enough.

If he could say nothing else for his home, it reminded him of true edibility. He hadn’t been so full in weeks.

He wanted to take Kittan with him to look at the Face-God. Alone. If they could get away from the villagers, somehow, escape the gaze they’d cast upon them like a net, he would take Kittan to the lakeside and they would just look. Over the tops of the heads in the crowd, Rossiu could see the very top edge of the Face-God’s forehead. He knew how flat it was, how unsettlingly close to human without the curves and elasticity of a fleshy visage. He tried to imagine a human face, all covered in skin and cushioned with tissue, with those features. The image never came. He supposed it was better that it didn’t.

Rossiu didn’t recognize a light little clink on the ground as Kittan setting down his empty plate. But as if they’d waited for the moment to leap from the shadows and claim their prey, Gimmy and Darry hurled themselves from the perimeter of the masses, hand-in-hand, and rushed to his side. Darry picked up the plate. Her brother, relentless as ever, engaged Kittan in a second-long staredown.

“How many face-gods are there in the Holy Lands?” he asked.

“Uh.” Likely to his delight, Rossiu was already looking at him when he turned to him. He cocked an eyebrow, and Rossiu shrugged.

Slowly, and making a quiet popping noise with his lips, Kittan looked back over at Gimmy. “Uh…A lot. Whole lot. Can’t count that high.”

“I bet they’re all over the place, huh?” Gimmy asked. He pushed his hands together and forced them up over his head, where he unlocked them and shot them out as if tracing the arc of a rainbow. “You really can’t count that many of ‘em?”

Kittan let Gimmy’s voice echo while he grinned. Rossiu glanced back and forth at the two of them just to double-check that he’d seen it. Gimmy, of all people here in Adai, made Kittan smile. “ _’Course_ they’re all over the place!” he exclaimed with a chuckle. “Can’t go two feet without seein’ one of ‘em.”

Now Darry shuffled to her brother’s side. Tucking her head down, she looked Kittan over for a moment. “Do they all look the same?” she asked.

“H- no.” He jerked back for a second, and Rossiu looked away, into the crowd. There, a middle-aged woman began to push through the shadows toward them. Kittan didn’t notice. He continued. “There’s all kinds. Big ones and little ones. All sortsa colors. All got different faces.”

“Do they all look mad like ours?” Gimmy asked.

“Yeah. Well—no. Most of ‘em do,” he replied. The woman shoved her way into the clearing. “’Course I look pretty mad, too, don’t I?” he scrunched his eyebrows down and tried to force his smile to flip upside-down. It only wrinkled. He feigned a growl. When the twins laughed, he did too.

The woman stood just behind them. She placed one hand on Gimmy’s shoulder and the other on Darry’s. “Gimmy. Darry. The Father said you are not to speak with them yet.” They looked up at her, shoulders slumping, the lights in their eyes dimming. She nodded first at Kittan, then at Rossiu. “I am terribly sorry.”

Kittan spent a moment in legitimate bewilderment, hesitating. “Uh, it—it’s—it’s fine, I don’t—”

“Father Magin sent me to ask if there is anything more the two of you need.”

Rossiu’s shoulders sagged when he cringed into himself. He couldn’t stop it. Magin further refused to deal with them himself, but he supposed that, in a way, it was no longer his business to do so. The people wanted them there. Not him. He looked up at the woman and tried not to appear disgusted with her; she’d done nothing. She only followed the very man Rossiu himself had followed since before he’d grown the capability for memory. What more did she have? He looked over at Kittan next, who peered back at him and shrugged.

“I dunno,” Kittan said. “You tired, Rossiu? I’m pretty tired. Been a long day, I could use some sleep.”

Rossiu nodded, the lolling of his head unearthing a sigh. He couldn’t determine if he could actually fall asleep, but he followed Kittan and the woman, who left Gimmy and Darry with a youngish man on the way out of the mass. They parted for the three of them and left a parade of wide-eyed mumbles as they passed.

She told them they would have to sleep apart—protocol. They were not family. Two villagers, eager to be of service to their saviors, sacrificed their rooms for as long as they could, and would camp in the quarters of others. Not that it mattered; night on the surface, today, was Adai’s mid-morning.

Rossiu didn’t remember the rooms quite as identical as they were. They were carved into a rock wall, two rows on top of one another, twenty in each row, large enough for a long, wide bed carved out of the stone and an empty area for whatever its occupants needed it to hold. Whole families stayed in some; lonesome individuals occupied others. Forty rooms for fifty people. Rossiu was sure each held a ghost. He’d seen death in nearly all of them.

The fourth room from the left on the bottom row became Kittan’s quarters. Rossiu and their guide left him standing in the doorway after he gave Rossiu a stammering, “Uh, g-g’night,” and another shrug. The woman took Rossiu by the shoulder and began to lead him the rest of the way down the hall and toward the staircase, and he kept his head turned all the while. Kittan waved him goodbye, this distant fading gesture as he shrank into the shadows far down the way. Rossiu tried to wave back, but when they reached the staircase, he couldn’t see him anymore. He blended in. If anyone continued to wave, the rotating hands dissolved into the dark.

He couldn’t sleep in the room in the very middle of the top row. Without giving Kittan a true “goodnight,” and without receiving anymore recognition from the Father that they had even arrived in the confines of Adai, Rossiu lay flat on his back, still in all his clothing, save his boots and his new poncho, which he’d cast to the floor as soon as the door shut, eyes wide as if he’d burned his eyelids away, awake. The whole of his familiarity with Kittan’s existence rested within the borders of the present and the last time he’d slept within sight of him. He couldn’t substitute the blankets for Kittan’s arms around him, no matter how he bunched them up against his back and around his shoulders. Adai Village had always been cold.

Whenever he closed his eyes, he blamed Magin for everything. Magin, who had been to the surface and knew the gunmen up there lived to kill; Magin, who had sent countless villagers, Rossiu’s mother, Rossiu himself, to die at their hands; Magin, who wouldn’t let his village assert itself; Magin, who outright lied to the people who trusted him most, and said that a deadly machine lodged in their walls was a god, and its brethren convened in paradise, so the chosen ones would embrace death as destiny. Never try to improve what they have; just settle for lie after lie after lie. Did they want to stay so complacent? Did they ever even think to try to improve things for themselves?

Rossiu wanted to roll over and hurl himself to the floor when he couldn’t remember the thought ever crossing his mind while he apprenticed for Magin. He was accomplice to a fraud. At some point he stopped calling him Father in his head. What father cared so little that he wouldn’t even try to offer an explanation? He hid. He left it up to the imaginations of the villagers. He was no priest.

At any point he could have forgiven Magin. He remembered vaguely the sensation that he’d understood the actions he’d taken, and the choices he’d made, but he had only that now. Why had he understood? Magin wiped his memory clean when he abandoned him.

But the more he blamed Magin, the more Rossiu felt his body crumpling up, rolling from his side to his stomach. He buried his face in the pillow until he couldn’t even smell the old dirt coating every one of Adai’s surfaces. He couldn’t have been more cowardly if he’d tried. All offense and no defense, when Magin asked him one question it pulled the poise from his mouth like rotted teeth. He forced Kittan to pick up the slack. He forgot to ask any of the other questions he’d stockpiled, and now he had no way to confirm if he’d ever get another chance to ask. What did the scriptures say? Honestly, what had Magin found on the surface? Why didn’t he know what the ‘face-gods’ actually were? Even then he wondered if there even was a point. It wouldn’t matter what Magin had to say about the final thing he wanted to ask. If Magin still brimmed with as much anger as he had when he’d told them to leave, Rossiu would receive some answer meant for a fool. Again.

Rossiu wondered how Kittan was doing in his room. He didn’t know how much time had passed since they’d retreated to attempt sleep. He tried to picture Kittan alone in his room, sleeping in total silence while thrashing about as if sleep-swimming. Deep breaths only came when he thought of him long enough, but his eyes still wouldn’t shut. He heard his thoughts rebounding from wall to wall.

He couldn’t sleep in that room. His body, spoiled, would not let him. Eyeballs heavy behind lids that wouldn’t touch, Rossiu rolled to the side of the bed, touched his feet to the ground, let the blanket slide from his shoulders, walked to the door, and left. His restless body did the thinking for him.

Out on the walkway, his hands found his shoulders again. Rossiu supposed he should have been prepared for the rude temperature disparity between his blanket and the still air, but he paused, once, intending only to let a shiver out. When he opened his eyes, he saw across the top of the large rock structure separating the living quarters from the common area.

The Face-God stared back at him with its paint-chipped eyes, the aftermath of a gargantuan beheading. As ever the water touched its lips, never thirsty, never wanting, never needing, never giving half a thought to the people who surrounded it and bestowed upon it fear and devotion and awe for centuries, for millennia, perhaps, nor for the man who created a sweeping mythos of its greatness to placate the lot of them. Yet he knew its unmoving features so well even he couldn’t believe it.

It didn’t suit Kittan. No alien monolith could suit someone so astoundingly human.

Rossiu’s hand crawled from his shoulder to his collar bone, and his fingers extended out and curled back into a loose fist several times before he settled his fingertips on his bottom lip. He had cold skin; the cold, wet, pale skin of a pit-dweller. Rossiu and the Face-God watched each other a moment longer. Rossiu tore away from its gaze and headed down the hallway.

After he descended the staircase, he checked for signs that anyone may be nearby. He heard the remote hums of the villagers working near the commons and down the darkest of the corridors, but saw no one. He continued toward Kittan’s room.

He’d left his door ajar. Rossiu hesitated. He lifted his hand up once, then a second time, then a third, before deciding to tap it lightly three times in succession against the stone door. He peeked inside, squinting.

“…Rossiu? ‘Zat you?”

Rossiu edged closer into the doorway, body pressing up against the side. “Kittan…M-may I come in?”

“’Course you can.” From the scant traces of light in the hall, Rossiu could see Kittan sit up, one leg bent on the bed, the other half under his blanket and touching the floor. Another moment’s worth of adjustment to the darkness, and he made out nothing but skin on Kittan’s body. He had been planning on sleeping alone, after all; Rossiu began to back away, flushing at the nerve he’d had. But Kittan waved him in anyway, forgiving as ever. “What’s up?”

He trudged inside and shut the door behind him. He kept his focus on the ground. His eyes perfectly comfortable in the dark, he had to hide them from the shadowy vastness of bare skin before him. At least Kittan had the presence of mind to sleep with his underwear on. Rossiu stood at the bedside and chewed on his mouth.

“I had trouble sleeping.”

“Me too,” Kittan said, pushing himself the rest of the way up. He leaned his back against the wall. “I dunno if I like it here. Everybody watchin’ all the time, the fuckin’…Magin.”

“I’m sorry I brought you,” Rossiu’s hands, which had seconds earlier rested on his shoulders, began to creep toward his neck. His fingers extended and reached up into his hair.   
“This isn’t a good place for us.”

“Don’t,” Kittan groaned.

Rossiu only twirled his hair in knotty bunches around each finger. He pressed them against his head, just behind his ears, and his neck responded by leaning forward. Better view of the ground. He’d never once thought of Adai Village as a place to which he’d particularly enjoy returning. He couldn’t bear to look up at Kittan and see him here, inside it. No matter how much Kittan said he may have disliked it, the actual sight of him,  _Kittan,_  surrounded by Adai’s muddle-hued squalor, the sight he’d never been able to make into a reality, made Rossiu’s chest tighten. Kittan belonged on the surface, where the sun illuminated all his sharp edges and bright colors and where his black clothing marked him like a hieroglyph against the golden, sandy tablet of the earth. It wasn’t fair.

Kittan sighed. “…Weird in here all by myself.”

“I did not like being alone much, either,” Rossiu whispered. He pulled on his hair and locked his hands into place. Again, his chest began to constrict. Everything constricted. For that moment and that moment alone, everything he’d been told to keep silent, and everything he told himself to keep silent, throbbed at the bottom of his throat like he’d keel over and let it gush from his mouth. He couldn’t contain the religion and he couldn’t contain how terrible, how uncomfortable, how lonely and wrong it had been in his bed, alone, without Kittan there with him. If he could just ask if that had been Kittan’s difficulty, if he’d likewise sat in bed freezing, yearning for another body beside him, he would. But he couldn’t say. The musty air leapt for his throat to gnaw at it. He swallowed it back down with one gulp. Anything for a solution.

He decided he could let it drain. “It’s strange. I slept alone for such a long time, but now it…I don’t know,” he shook his head. “I don’t know. I-it just…It feels so much more natural to sleep with another person.”

No sooner had he looked up than Kittan’s eyes flew open and his head jerked back. His mouth tightened and curved downward into that intense arch of a frown. Even in the darkness, Rossiu saw his cheeks grow red. He said nothing.

Draining was a terrible idea. Rossiu hung his head. “That was a strange thing to say. I am sorry.”

“N-no, it—no, it’s—it’s fine, I get—It’s fine,” Kittan ruffled his hair, looking away.

They both fell quiet. Rossiu dug his toes into the ground, considering how prudent it would be to just turn and leave and spare them both the humiliation, whatever had been the cause. He’d let too much spill from the pipe.

When long enough had passed, Kittan’s eyes crept back over before the rest of his face did. “…I guess I know what you’re talkin’ about, though. I was sittin’ here all like, ‘man, where the fuck’s Rossiu at, I wish he was here.’ Thought about goin’ and gettin’ you.”

Rossiu eased back up toward him. “…Is that so?”

“Heh. And then…” Kittan tried to keep his mouth from inching into a half-smile to no avail. He waved his hand until it signaled toward Rossiu. “…Here you are.”

Rossiu couldn’t remember ever hearing himself giggle in Adai Village before.

Kittan patted the empty half of his bed. “C’mere.”

Obedient, Rossiu nodded to him and climbed in, careful not to brush even a clothed bit of himself against Kittan’s bare skin. “Thank you, Kittan.”

“No problem.”

Kittan settled back down beside him. He rested on his side and pulled the blanket over both of them. They shared a pillow, facing each other. As soon as he finished evening out the wrinkles in the blanket, Kittan buried his arm under it and wrapped it around Rossiu.

No one would disturb them here.

Rossiu breathed. He leaned in and let his forehead rest against Kittan’s neck, and he held him back, hands on his shoulder blades.

“I’m sorry I told you we shouldn’t touch,” he muttered.

Kittan shook his head. “N-no, it’s—it’s okay, I—I mean, I get it. You guys aren’t really—don’t really do that down here, huh?”

“I never should have told you we shouldn’t.” As quickly as Kittan had both stopped and started the motion, Rossiu began to shake his own head, slowly, back and forth, letting his hair tangle against Kittan’s skin. “I—we—the people here—it’s—just—does not happen.”

Kittan scoffed. “No, I caught that, I mean, when I was tryna talk to Gimmy and Darry, and whatserface came over? You kiddin’ me? I wanted to be like, ‘What is this, you’re not allowed to smile or somethin’?’ Sad fuckin’ place.”

Rossiu wanted to dive back in toward him. He only spoke. He would let it siphon out of this drain now. “I know. I know! And—this is the problem, Kittan! This is what they do!” He wouldn’t stop. He could feel it rising in him like a flower at the first onset of dawn, nagging the sun for its nighttime absence. “Everyone knows they will either depart for the surface or die down here. If they die down here, it means they were not chosen. And if they were not chosen, they need to make sure that the Face-God will forgive them and offer them another chance at reaching heaven. This—this is what they believe. S-so they spend their time focusing on prayer, and they don’t spend time being with the people they have down here. They distance themselves from them so they don’t hurt when they go, or when those people go. We don’t bother with—with good things! It hurts too much in the end. W-we’re terrified of our god.

“M-my…My mother th-thought she was doing me a favor by never telling me she loved me.” He thought he inhaled deeply, but the air sat at a shallow corner in his throat. “I-it…It isn’t human. W-we’re hiding.”

He had no idea how hot his face had grown until Kittan placed his hand on it.

He couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry I brought you here. I’m sorry you had to explain everything to Magin for me. I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Kittan said. “We’re a team, don’t be an idiot. You ain’t gotta be sorry for shit.”

“I don’t want you to have anything to do with a place like this,” Rossiu was shaking his head again, closing his eyes against the dull, heavy pain. “You’re too good for it, Kittan!”

“Quit it, Rossiu!” Kittan grabbed the sides of his face again. One hand alone would have likely covered it, but he kept both in place and pulled just enough to open Rossiu’s eyes. “I ain’t too good for shit, what are you even talkin’ about? I—F-fuck. Don’t—don’t cry.”

Kittan started wiping his cheeks dry before he could even quite register it all. Kittan, Kittan was the factor. Rossiu knew before that he would—could—only cry in Kittan’s presence, at his words, under his influence, but only at that second could he acknowledge it. They were in Adai and Rossiu’s whole chest crumbled into a fine powder. He squeezed Kittan when he felt him brush his tears away again. He was crying even harder and he couldn’t even hear himself, and just then he wasn’t quite sure he was within his rights to call whatever this was a crush anymore.

“K-Kittan, you’re—I—” he had to say something. Anything. His stomach swelled and narrowed to break apart every letter of every word of his already jumbled thoughts. They liquefied.

“Rossiu.”

Kittan’s hands left his face only so he could reach under the blanket and pull him into a hug. He either dragged Rossiu close, or Rossiu scooted forward in time; it didn’t matter. Kittan reached into Rossiu’s hair, toying softly with the long chestnut strands at the back. He nudged the top of his head with his chin and, in a roundabout way, his mouth. And in the middle of it all, unmistakably, with a touch lighter than the jet stream of a passing dragonfly, Kittan pressed his lips against Rossiu’s forehead. He kissed him: just once, only part of a larger motion.

Rossiu froze and thawed when his entire body, it seemed, pulsed with heat. Kittan, meanwhile, eased off. He made a noise to himself. He looked anywhere but at Rossiu before he closed his eyes, finally. Kittan was just as red as Rossiu had to be.

 “T-tomorrow, okay?” Kittan said. “J-just—w-we gotta make Magin talk to us. We’re gonna—you—y-you need some sleep.”

Rossiu had nothing he could say. He wanted to hover in position, an inch removed on every surface between Kittan and himself. Make a barrier. He wouldn’t leave his side, ever, if he could only keep himself from collapsing and falling against him, everything touching everything, too much at once.

Kittan eased his hands back down to Rossiu’s waist. “D-don’t be sorry you brought me here. It’s—I told you. I wasn’t comin’ here just to get myself a gunmen. I wanted—like, I had to—this place is important to you an all,” Rossiu felt himself begin to coast while Kittan went on, and on, and on. He wouldn’t stop. Rossiu wouldn’t try to make him. “’Cause it’s exactly like you said the other day. Half your soul, that whole thing. You’re totally right. Bachika’s the same for me. You get it.

“’Cause…Heh, it’s weird. I can see you comin’ from a place like this, but you’re still…I dunno. I can’t explain it. It’s just…Like, the place that made you. Home and all. Had to see it for myself. Figured, y’know, since we’re so the same about this typa shit, like—if Bachika was still around, we’d end up goin’ there eventually. I know exactly what you mean, is my point. About—here. All that.”

Rossiu eased against him with a long exhalation. Kittan settled back.

“I don’t think you’re hidin’ from shit. Not you.”

Kittan spoke through a yawn. “You wanna go back to your room, or—”

“—No.”

If anyone found them in that room, in that bed, like that before they awoke, then let that be a lesson to them, Rossiu thought.

Neither of them could be sure if they’d nodded off at all. They may very well have slept for a second, or even hours that passed in the span of a finger-snap, but when the ground shook, and little pebbles fell amid a cloud of dust from the ceiling of the room, the very concept of sleep dissipated to an alien comfort. Rossiu sat up before realizing he’d awoken; Kittan shot up right after him. Distant, stifled screams lifted to join the rumbling. Rossiu rolled out of Kittan’s lap. Together, with no time to grab their gift ponchos and adorn themselves with dignity, they stumbled from the room into the candlelit hallway.

They halted when it turned away from a deadlock on the Face-God and settled on the two of them out of the corner of its colossal scarlet eye. The rock formation dividing Adai hid part of the gunmen, but it was an angular thing, pointy all over, and it extended a spidery limb to creep toward them. Sunlight poured down from an opening in the ceiling and glittered against the crimson metal that composed it. It sneered with a jagged, fanged mouth.

A scattering group of villagers tore down the hallway toward Rossiu and Kittan, away from the gunmen. If only to avoid the stampede, Kittan grabbed Rossiu and pulled him with him until their backs slammed against the wall. “Shit, it musta followed us last night!” he cried, and he lifted his hands and half-turned toward the bedroom. “Stay right here! I got one of my bombs in my room, I’ll be right back out!”

The second Rossiu spent watching Kittan’s back as he headed for the room seemed the intersection of several cosmoses. He still had yet to wake up fully; he tried to reclaim his energy by telling himself, in some way, to do so. He saw the shadow of the encroaching gunmen darken the whole hall, swallowing Kittan just before he could touch his hand to the doorway. Villagers screamed and flooded past, and out of the corner of his sleep-weary eye, Rossiu saw Darry in the arms of an older teenage girl. He remembered suddenly when he’d told Kittan not to throw the bomb at the boulder keeping them from entering Adai, and the memory ferried him to when he’d told him not to touch him in the village, and then to apparently hours earlier when Kittan, with his arms around him, had kissed him,  _kissed him,_ and talked him to the quiet blankness pre-sleep. He barely processed what Kittan meant, that the gunmen must have followed them, powered down for the night, and then awoke in the morning to rend both them and all of Adai Village to scraps, when that thin spider-leg reached out and smashed itself into the wall just beyond Rossiu. It trapped Kittan, angled across the side of his body. His head slammed against the rock. When the gunmen pulled its leg away, Kittan slumped to the floor on his stomach, bleeding from the shoulder and the opposite temple, out cold, all one instant.

Drenched in sweat that instant and screaming, Rossiu came to. He threw himself over to Kittan’s side and screeched for him to wake up. He blotted the blood from his head with the back of his hand and felt himself rock in place, his heart beating so quickly and with such intensity it sent his breaths into the same pattern, all shallow and rapid, and he began to see more stars than bits of the world around him.

“There you are!” the beastman inside the gunmen snickered. “Looks like we’re both lucky, huh? You two can die together.”

Rossiu looked up from Kittan only to see how it intended to make him spend the last second of his life. It lifted its leg again, and when it slowed high up, raised to its peak, it aimed its footless, pointed claw. It would drop like a tethered flechette and spear the both of them, and they’d die in each other’s arms.

But Rossiu did not have the time for its intentions.

Every cell of his skin bristled; everything charged. With an ionized body, Rossiu leapt to his feet and, with all his strength in one motion, yanked Kittan by his shoulders back into the bedroom. Rossiu stumbled to the floor, the back of his head bumping against it, when the ground trembled again. He lay with Kittan’s chin resting just below his stomach and he slid out, carefully but quickly, from underneath him. When he woke up—if he woke up—he would not want his face buried in between Rossiu’s hips. He sat up and wiped another trickle of blood away before it dripped into his eyebrow, peculiarly relaxed.

From the doorway, Rossiu could see the gunmen trying to wrench its leg free from the ground. Even with the bit of difficulty it seemed to have, Rossiu figured he had time enough only to check Kittan for a pulse and try to find the solitary orb of flammable water. He’d never truly mused on a strategy if he ever wound up alone, and he couldn’t remember if he’d ever taken enough note of the apparent combat style of any given gunmen. But, convinced he needed to distract it, he took a breath and focused back on Kittan. Gunmen went for what they knew they could get. If they took anything else out in the process, it was merely a bonus. Rossiu knew that much. He snatched Kittan’s wrist and held his breath, shaking.

He heard and felt a low series of pulsations over the grinding in the hallway. If Kittan would stay alive, Rossiu would do the same. He rocketed to his feet when the gunmen freed its leg from the ground.

The last time he’d seen the flammable water, Kittan had shoved it into his pocket. He would only have to pick up his pants, like doing laundry—only laundry—and feel around until he found it.  _If_  he could find the pants. He looked around the floor and in the darkness saw only shadows. What he thought may have been Kittan’s shirt was the silhouette of a jagged tiny outcrop on the wall. The pants could have been anywhere. The ground shook again, and he held onto the wall to stay upright.

There was a marauding gunmen outside the door, smashing Rossiu’s innocent village to powder, and he was scurrying about a room that was not his, trying to find another man’s pants.

He couldn’t even pause to feel ridiculous. If he was going to distract the thing, was a bomb necessary? All it wanted was his flesh. Rossiu didn’t have the time for any such diversions. He ran out the door without looking back. The sight of Kittan, unconscious, bleeding, and barely clothed, would do him no good.

Rossiu stood in the hallway no more than a second before the gunmen’s shadow fell over him. No more villagers ran down the corridor, but behind him, echoing, he heard their cries. He scoffed. Father Magin was nowhere in sight. The gunmen halted over him.

“There you are!” it said. “Gonna stay still this time?”

Never once had the Black Siblings obeyed an order from a gunmen. For Kittan’s sake, he dropped any persistent residue of thought and just ran. He ran forward, in a straight line, through the gunmen’s shadow. When he looked up, he saw only its wide, red underside, and he shut his eyes. He gathered himself each time he nearly tripped on a pebble or, once, a child’s lost shoe, and he ran until the light returned, all bright from up on the surface, to pierce through his eyelids. He’d made it from one end of the gunmen to the other.

He opened his eyes. The gunmen began to turn around, crawling on its stick-legs to glower at him, eager for him to give it one more reason to attack. His eyes flicked over to glance to his left. One second showed him the light shimmering on the surface of the pond.

“Rossiu, step aside!”

Of course he didn’t. He’d done quite well, he thought, not thinking at all, until he stopped, and his mind took back over. Ravenous for answers once more, Rossiu forgot not to think. He couldn’t move. Father Magin, wielding a long, blunt stick, the village’s only weapon, did the job for him and shoved him over to the side.

Adai villagers had a terrible habit of falling to absolute pieces at the slightest hint of upheaval. The extraordinary crushed their brains in its fist until it unfolded and let wet pink matter glisten across its fingertips. It only bothered to leave intact the reflexes to scream and run; the luckier ones received a new brain, entirely not their own.

The Father was a lucky man.

He stood before the gunmen, now halfway turned to meet their eyes, holding the stick as if he’d perhaps at least get a chance to jam it into an eye or a joint in his final moment.

But that was all he did. Rossiu watched him long enough, until the gunmen had finally maneuvered itself to face him, and Magin did nothing. He just stood with the stick at the ready. Rossiu squinted. Magin’s eyes quivered between his eyelids. He’d stopped to think.

But he’d emerged. He’d had dignity enough to counterstrike his own plans. Rossiu could pay him homage at least in that regard. He turned, and his body hijacked his brain.

Rossiu felt his way across the stone, all barefoot and bounding. He heard metal creaking behind him, hushed by a distance he’d either started to create or that he’d imagined into existence. Water rushed around his feet, and a step later, it rippled around his ankles, then his shins, his knees, and his hips until he couldn’t reach the bottom and he slogged his way into an improvised dog-paddle. He looked up and knew the stones he saw, and he heard something shouting for him. His chest bumped against a boulder in the lake, and he climbed onto it. Rossiu reached for something he wasn’t sure he’d seen. When his hand closed around it, he yanked, and then he pulled, and a moment later, soaked and heavy and missing a minute of his life, he opened his eyes and surveyed the sun-splattered panorama of Adai Village from inside the face of his God.

He’d already clenched his hands around the levers and positioned his feet on the pedals below. Either its long-lost beastman pilot had had the misfortune of a body the size of Rossiu’s, or the gunmen had sat all these centuries waiting for him. Panting, staring into the eyes of the intruding gunmen at the waterside, noting Magin slack-jawed beside it, he tightened his grip on the levers.

_Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense. You just know it. And then it happens._

_Fighting spirit._

Coincidence was never logical.

“You!” the beastman shouted from across the lake. “What’s this all about? You’re one of the rebels?”

“I’m protecting my village!” Rossiu cried. He leaned forward to push the flesh of his palms into the levers, as if his blood would pump from his body into the metal. The cockpit lurched first to one side, then the other. Some blinding wave of vertigo flicked him between the eyes and he leaned in even harder, and the gunmen closed up all around him.

“Oh, you humans are just cute nowadays,” the beastman snickered. “Too bad you and this old guy are the only ones trying to do anything down here! Disgraceful. But it’s alright—no one’s gonna remember how pathetic any of you are once I’m through, anyway!”

Maybe Rossiu hallucinated the crude little mock-ups of his head, with his wide forehead stretching above his almond-shaped eyes, circled in red and slashed through, dotting the glass panels. He heard the klaxons blaring and ignored them over the sound of his own voice, his snarl. “ _Don’t you ever call my people disgraceful._ ”

The cockpit rattled. Rossiu had long since locked himself so thoroughly in place that he couldn’t be sure he’d ever get out. The warning icons flipped from red to bright green; he saw the glow on his hands, still white-knuckling on the controls. The rumbling steadied, and the windows on all sides cleared. The gunmen—his gunmen—was standing. The lake below rushed as if retreating between its legs.

The beastman chuckled. “Oh, is that how it’s gonna be? Well, who are you, givin’ me such a sassy mouth?”

Rossiu felt himself sit up straight. If he wanted an answer, he could be courteous and give him one.

“Someone who is not here to play around with you!” He never heard his voice so clearly, so loudly, so pared back to primal. It pushed his whole body forward against the levers, and the god-gunmen thrust forward through the water.

“Someone who has no patience for the willfully ignorant!” The enemy gunmen had frozen in place and Rossiu had picked up speed.

“Someone who will not let someone like you make us forget the surface, where we belong, or the villages we come from!” He lifted his gunmen’s arm. It needed a name, didn’t it?

He talked beyond himself. Something more than Rossiu on his own had seized his throat and used it, and he couldn’t dream of struggling against it. “As long as I am alive—as long as my Agodego moves—the memory of everything you’ve destroyed will live! When these people speak of their savior, they are referring to me!

 “I am Rossiu of Adai Village!” He combusted.  “Do you understand precisely who I am?”

Agodego lifted its arm and swung it like a hammer to knock the red gunmen aside. It careened back into the water and skidded through it, the surface of the lake churning up into white waves. Rossiu opened his eyes after not realizing he’d closed them. The enemy gunmen, half crushed against the back wall of the village, sat motionless in the roiling pond; the water had started to drain into a massive opening the side of Agodego. Down at the rock that separated Adai in two, Magin had flattened himself against it, and Rossiu watched him out of the corner of his eye for any sign of movement. His heart beat to punch through his ribcage.

And then from the very edge of his periphery, just a speck from his blind spot, Rossiu saw something rush from the other side of the rock, over into the direction of the water. When he turned, Agodego turned.

Blood-stained from his hair to his elbow, wearing nothing but his underwear and not stopping to care for an instant, Kittan dove into the lake and emerged a moment after. He crawled up a boulder like a spider and hopped to the peak of the next one, then the next, and then, back in turbulent water that reached his chest, pounded on the dented door of the enemy gunmen. Fighting the pull of the current, he climbed onto the surface of it and pulled like he’d let his arms detach before he quit.

When the cockpit doors parted, Kittan reached in and seized the lion-headed beastman inside before the water even rushed in. Kittan threw him backward into the water by the collar of his red hooded sweatshirt. He leapt inside. The doors closed, the unconscious beastman drained along with the water into the cavern Agodego once dammed, and by the time Rossiu looked back at the damaged red gunmen, it stood. Rossiu spent his last panting, huffing second without thought running over to the gaping wound in Adai’s wall and eased Agodego back into place.

“Hot  _fuck_ , Rossiu!” Kittan all but screamed from his own gunmen. “You’re fuckin’  _awesome_! Holy shit, you’re my favorite!”

Rossiu’s bones nearly melted when he let go of Agodego’s controls. The gunmen opened its cockpit. He hid his face in his hands; at some point, he’d have to breathe, or his heart would explode, and when he forced a sharp puff of air into his lungs, he sobbed.

He’d stolen God. Whether he made a deity a mortal or reinvigorated the holiest of talismans, he could not have done a good thing. He’d be dead if he’d thought about any of it, and now he looked out into Adai Village and saw the lake sitting restless and shallow. Beyond, Magin crept slowly from the shadows, less furious than terrified, if Rossiu dared to spoil himself with hope. He trembled. Tears flowed into the remnant pond water covering his palms. Shadows flooded the sunlit common area from either side. A choral refrain amplified from the shore.

“Rossiu! Rossiu! Rossiu!”

They were chanting. He clamped his hair behind his ears. They had no idea he’d destroyed them.


	14. 14

They carried him on a wave of hands back to the shore of the lake.

They offered him towels and water and food, as soon as they could prepare it.

They dropped to their knees and prayed for him, to him. “Our savior!”

They would do anything for him and they would do it all in one amalgamated multitude, one mind with ninety-eight hands. Together.

He looked back. Kittan abandoned his damaged new mecha and fought his way through the water. He was greeted like an apostle. They draped him in a long white cloth that he used as both towel and garment. He stuttered apologies and tripped over his own knees pushing through the crowd over toward him, but he never made it. He couldn’t push back hard enough.

Everyone begged Rossiu to give them something to do. He stood duck-footed at the side of the lake, holding someone’s poncho around his wet body. He looked down and saw his pants clinging to his ankles, soaked. Water must have seeped into his ears when he ran through the pond. Every sound filtered through a thick liquid into his head.

“I would like to take a bath,” he said.

The eager horde started to fracture. Some number of its members took Rossiu by the shoulders and started to lead him toward the hall. On the way, he peeked over his shoulder at Magin, who seemed neither ready to look back nor ready to acknowledge him. He passed by Kittan. He peered up at him, suspicious of the weight his eyes seemed to accumulate. Kittan gave him a dumb look back, silent and confused, and he rocked forth on his heel as if he intended to follow. Rossiu looked back ahead and closed his eyes. Kittan never showed up behind him. He would thank him for staying behind later.

He could only be alone in the spring. Hours earlier he could have invested in the hope of camping out in his loaned bedroom, but now, the Savior of Adai Village had lost his cloister. This was the way of it, he supposed; back when he was only the apprentice, he could go unnoticed whenever he wanted. Magin had the hardest time seeking isolation. Those they wanted the most, even when they constructed barrier after barrier for the sake of utmost necessity, would be hunted down and held in awe like treasure. He had to bury himself.

They left him with the driest towels and the newest soap. Their new pet to spoil; he said nothing before they closed the door. He listened to make sure no one had parked outside the door of the spring room before he even considered removing his clothing. He still hesitated. He stood at the side of the spring and watched the warm little bubbles rise from the geothermal depths to pop at the surface and pinch the cheeks of his reflection. Leaving his clothes unfolded, sitting in a wrinkled mass on the ground, Rossiu stepped back to the water’s edge and dipped a cool, already damp toe into the water. It dissolved his bones, and he slumped into the spring.

With his head tilted back, the bubbles rose along his back and to his neck. The water stroked his hair into an undulating fan. The heat reached with vapor fingers to pull his eyelids shut.

Rossiu had destroyed the religion. Clearly the villagers didn’t realize it yet. They saw the priest’s soft-spoken acolyte return from heaven and bring their God to life in order to protect them all from murder at the hands of another god, an evil one. A devil. Kittan, the disciple, exorcised it. Rossiu had predicted the same thing all too long ago.

He called himself the savior. That was the worst of it.

Who was Rossiu to rewrite the workings of the pantheon to whose creation Magin had devoted his life? He came in and annihilated it all with Magin’s own idol. What would they do now, with so many questions they’d surely ask?

Why are there devils?

What makes a devil?

Will Rossiu stay and protect us?

Why could Rossiu control God?

If my loved one came back from the Holy Lands, would they be able to awaken God?

Is the face truly God?

Is Rossiu God?

He wondered how many sects they’d break into before the holy wars started. Magin could never answer things like this. Magin couldn’t create a new religion, not again, not this quickly, not with Rossiu at the head. It terrified him so deeply the temperature of the water all around him dropped to freezing, and he sunk further into it to absorb the chill. His skin prickled. His teeth chattered. His eyes welled with frost. He deserved it all.

When the heat crept back in around his body, he slept.

He woke up pruned. Two of the candles lighting the spring room had burnt out, and faintly, he could smell the last traces of the smoke that rose in place of the fire. Arms on marionette strings, he reached for the soap and let it sit in his hand in the water. He did nothing with it. The longer he toyed with it, letting it glide in between his fingers, the slicker it became. Beyond the room, someone spoke, and, though muffled, Rossiu could still hear the echo. They’d been talking since before Rossiu woke up.

Outside, Magin was preaching to his followers. Rossiu sat up, tilting his head until he could hear it most clearly.

“…from the Holy Lands, for he loves us as we love him. He has told the people of the surface of our people, and they gave him the wisdom of how to protect us. They taught him how to breathe life into the shell of our Agodego, and it is with Agodego that Rossiu, our savior, will lead us to the heavens. For it is only by the meeting of holy body with human soul that we may advance. Rossiu will leave us. But he will return to lead us to our proper home, to salvation. Let us never forget him in his absence, nor Agodego, for we, in turn, are forever in their hearts. Adai Village, Rossiu, Agodego—we are all pieces of a shared soul.

“Amen.”

The forty-nine faithful replied, “Amen.”

Silence. It was an emergency sermon. Rossiu washed as quickly as he could, and dried and dressed even faster.

Who, exactly, had stolen Magin’s voice? Rossiu headed for the door, leaving the damp towels on the ground behind him. Magin of all people  _would_  have some kind of telepathic discourse without Rossiu’s knowledge; all the better to lead his flock. He narrowed his eyes when he pushed open the door. He’d track him down. Even if it had to be the Adai equivalent of midnight by now, Magin had no place to refuse. Sleep wouldn’t come when the sun shone down into the village, anyway. He stepped into the hall.

“Shit, ‘bout time.”

Rossiu nearly jumped. Water still dripping from the tips of his hair, he wheeled around to find Kittan, finally in a state of full dress, pushing away from the opposite wall.

“Kittan,” he said; as he spoke, droplets of water trickled from the ends of his hair, down his back and sent him prickling in the cool air. “…How long was I in there?”

“I dunno, least an hour. Gotta be more than an hour,” he shrugged. “Glad you came out, though. Thought you drowned or somethin’. Or maybe—”

Kittan bit his tongue inside his mouth. After a calculated effort to focus on the ground directly before his feet, he sighed. His eyes moved back to Rossiu, and he stepped toward him. “—Nah. I dunno.” He smiled, forcing a glimmer of pride into it. “I went and uh…I talked to Magin.”

“You—”

All the time Rossiu had spent thinking. All the time he’d spent thinking what he’d say to Magin, how he’d say it, how he’d approach him again when, if not for the raucous adoration of the villagers, he’d nearly kicked him out again. Rossiu had spent so much time wondering, and here Kittan had simply gone and done it.

“I thought you were gonna, but then you didn’t, so…Thought somebody oughta do it,” Kittan said, scratching the back of his head. “I mean, ‘cause—and why not me? You fuckin’ saved my life back there. Nobody else woulda lugged me back into the room. Least I could do was try to straighten this shit out for you, y’know, ‘cause you were walkin’ by me and you looked so—I dunno, fuckin’—not sad, just—you know. I dunno.”

Rossiu watched him while he spoke. He wouldn’t have been able to say, either; one word could never have summed it all up. His eyes, still heavy with sleep and warm water and congealed but not completely dry tears, lacked the strength to shine with gratitude quite yet, if indeed it would be proper anyway.

“Wh-when?” he asked. “What did you say? What—Kittan, I don’t—” he couldn’t get his mouth to close.

“Haha, relax.”

Kittan clapped a hand onto Rossiu’s shoulder. Guiding him to walk alongside him just before he moved it away, he shoved his other hand into his pocket. They were heading back toward the commons. “It was right after the…Guys brought you here,” he answered, bringing his hand out of his pocket to wave his pointed finger around like it could write the words he didn’t know in the air. “I went over to Magin and I pulled him away from everybody and I was like, ‘look, lemme tell you ‘bout Rossiu, okay, ‘cause you ain’t been with him since he’s been with me.’ ‘Cause I could tell what typa kid you musta been before you came up to the surface. Had to be, like, just like all these guys, ‘cept maybe a little less of a fuckin’ spaz, you ain’t like that. So I went up to Magin and I told him just about the shit we did. Talked about. Told him about Team Gurren and all that. All the…”

Looking away, Kittan stroked his collar. “…That—whole thing you said about here and—and Bachika. You know. S-so obviously he got it right away, I mean, he ain’t stupid. But then he was like, ‘well, whaddaya want me to do about it?’ and I was like, ‘fuckin’, don’t let these guys think he’s some—god or somethin’, he doesn’t want that.’ He said he couldn’t just  _not_. Everyone here for real wants you to be their savior, that’s what they think. He said nothin’ was gonna convince ‘em. So I just told him, y’know, ‘work your shit out. Don’t make ‘em think Rossiu’s gonna do anything he ain’t—that he can’t do. He’s still just Rossiu. Loves the shit outta you guys, but that don’t make him God.’ I mean, shit.”

Rossiu wondered if Kittan had spoken to Magin with such ease; if he had, where had it come from? Every time he thought about what he knew of Kittan, the way he processed who he was and the things he did and everything they’d ever done, he wanted to latch onto every tiny aspect and use it as a raft to float across one of those oceans Kittan spoke of. Even then, if he fell, he’d swim in the details and drown smiling. Kittan just hosed off with the big picture.

It was too easy. He frowned. “But…He said I’m going to lead them to the surface.”

Kittan just threw his head back and groaned. “Fuckin’ shit, Rossiu, how many times am I gonna hafta tell you to quit bein’ an idiot? ‘Course you’re gonna lead ‘em to the surface! You already said! Magin knows you mean what you say, didn’t need my dumb ass to tell him. I know you mean what you say, even if—fuckin’ ‘ _specially_  when you’re all charged up! It’s like when you’re drunk. Shit just comes out your mouth and it’s all the truth. You ain’t thinkin’. You just go with it.”

Rossiu remembered. He remembered all that time ago, before he even knew how he felt about Kittan, just after the first time he’d talked to Kamina, who told him he was suppressing his fighting spirit.

And Kittan had just said, “I been tellin’ you.”

Rossiu had a pathological knack for coming so close to sabotaging himself he could taste the defeat on the very tip of his tongue, and Kittan knew. He’d had to put up with it. He’d gone so far beyond merely putting up with it that he came all the way back to Adai with him—for him—on his own orders. Rossiu felt his fingers twitch.

When. Where. At what point in time, at which coordinates on the globe, did Rossiu do something to deserve the company, and the mercy, and the patience, and the curiosity, and the care of this person? Rossiu stayed with him to partake in all the wonders he offered, that he hadn’t earned. He couldn’t feel himself moving while he walked. He’d been gawking up at Kittan the whole time, his mouth wavering between precise horizontality and a quivering pout. Kittan had no reason to care for him as much as he did, so effortlessly.

And like the selfish, spoiled child he was, Rossiu took a long, slow, deep breath to cool the burn in his chest, because, if he admired truth as much as he’d always thought, he couldn’t say that whatever he felt still lingered as a crush. Simon had told him how it worked, the basics of evolution.

Kittan groaned again. “Aw, shit, what’re you lookin’ all sad for this time?”

He breathed again, and either his overall temperature rose to match, or he just acclimated to the heat. Yet he couldn’t look back up at him; any sooner than this and he’d blaze again. The littlest speckle of dust could have landed on him and punched his equilibrium into a frenzy. His eyes ached. “I just want to thank you,” he said.

“Aw, Rossiu…”

“For everything. For talking to Magin and talking to—to me all the time and for letting me stay with you and your sisters. I-I never even thanked you for saving me. I feel horrible.”

“Don’t.”

He walked in a meandering line. He almost gasped every time he came even an inch within bumping against Kittan. “I want to thank you for all of it and I don’t know how. It’s like…I’m going to just burst if I don’t s-say or—or—d-do it, but I don’t know what—I don’t—what I have to  _do_.”

Rubbing Rossiu’s shoulder with a clenched hand, Kittan looked away. “You already saved me, you ain’t gotta.”

Rossiu’s head slumped. “I don’t know how to say it, Kittan.”

“You ain’t gotta.”

He kept his hand there, and they walked. Rossiu could defend himself with words no more. Any onslaught would be met with a placid brush that would knock him onto the ground. He gave in and followed. The commons sat before them, immersed in sunlight pouring down from the hole in the village’s ceiling.

Then, suddenly: “Y’know, sometimes…” it could have just as easily come from the shadows of the cavern surrounding them as Kittan’s throat. “S-sometimes when you meet somebody, you’re just, like, ‘eh, whatever, same ol’, same ol’.’” He paused to cough. “Next thing you know you’re just, like, ‘man, what the fuck was I even doing way back when?’ I-it’s—it’s.” He shrugged. “S’okay.” He added a grunt and nothing more.

Were Rossiu a younger child, or even more spoiled than he could have sworn he was, he would weave an assumption from such a statement. He merely let the material linger in his hands, coarse untreated wool as good as satin. Together, he and Kittan crossed into the commons, where the last remnants of the crowd took their time disbanding. The villagers looked at them and, smiling, gave a serene bow of their heads toward them. Rossiu could breathe the surface’s fresh air curling down from so high up.

“I think I would like to speak with Father Magin now,” he said when they stopped at the entrance of the opposite hallway.

Kittan turned back to him, half-smiling, skin the lightest pink. “Good plan.”

Glancing back and forth between Kittan and the door to Magin’s quarters, Rossiu cleared his throat. “W-will you…Wait for me?”

“Don’t got much else to do,” Kittan shrugged. He chuckled.

Softly, Rossiu smiled back. They exchanged a nod. He turned, took a step, and breathed deep.

“Hey, Rossiu!” Kittan called.

Again, he almost jumped. After a moment to collect himself, and wondering if Kittan had actively decided to devote the day to startling him, he stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. “Hmm?”

Kittan lowered a hand from his mouth, a makeshift megaphone. “Why’d you name it Agodego?”

Of all the things on which Rossiu could have possibly meditated, that hadn’t come up for a second. Until he’d overheard Magin’s sermon, in fact, he hardly remembered that he’d given the Face-God a name. Agodego, indeed. He shrugged. “I just…Thought of it just then.”

Kittan beamed. “Nice. I’m callin’ mine King Kittan!”

He would. Rossiu’s shoulders lifted into his still-wet hair when he let out a silent giggle.

 “You like that?” Kittan laughed. “I like his face, but I dunno if red’s my color. Whaddaya think about gold?”

He tilted his head. “Not black?”

“Psh,” he scoffed. “Not for this.”

Rossiu could see Kittan in full, all dressed in the monochrome wardrobe he was sure he could only imagine him without because he’d witnessed it. If nothing else, no other color worked on him. Only that bright shock of sun-gold hair could accent it. Gold worked. Kittan probably deserved to gild himself. He’d chosen a palette and he had a talent for coordination.

Rossiu nodded. “…It’s perfect.”

At that, Kittan rounded the corner and disappeared into the commons. In his absence, Rossiu turned back around; feet welded to the floor, he gazed at Magin’s door.

When he’d awakened in the spring, the water had rippled around him. He couldn’t think over the moisture. Dry but for his hair, now, everything returned. All the questions. The echoing sermon snaking through the hollowed limestone to wake him. He started walking before he set his mind on it.

He paused at the door. Kittan had told Magin everything, hadn’t he? Rossiu had heard it all before he even knew. Only Kittan could have let him know, brought him to understand, to a point where, on the spot, he called a sermon to guide the village to some embryonic state of understanding. And yet, still, there had been so much time before, when Magin locked himself away and shunned the chance to hear it all from Rossiu himself. Somebody, somewhere, refused to take someone seriously, and Rossiu couldn’t triangulate the culprit.

He knocked. He could see Magin standing in the doorway, and a moment later, when he answered, he merely stepped into the mirage to solidify it. Wordless and harsh, he stared down at Rossiu.

He’d keep up the illusion by any means necessary. Rossiu stood straight.

“Father, I need to speak with you,” he said.

“It is quite late, Rossiu.”

“The sun is out.” He’d bulldoze in if he had to. “If you are going to incorporate me into this village’s religion, I have a right to understand it.”

Magin had to have vowed to freeze his entire being when silent. He gave neither the slightest twitch at the corner of his lips, nor a split-second falter of a bent finger around the scriptures. Rossiu’s eyes darted down to the book. There, he thought, was his first question. All others would rise from there. He could start. He’d interrogate like he’d always meant to. Settling back on Magin’s motionless face, he stiffened himself and waited. If he had to wait as long as Agodego had to be revived, he would, and he’d match Magin’s half-lidded derision from all that way down below.

With the heavy grace of a revolving door, Magin turned and stepped out of the way. “That you do. Come in.”

The conscientious guest, Rossiu stepped in quickly to spare Magin the wait. He was a busy man, after all. Just as before, Magin crossed the room and lowered himself into the chair, setting the scriptures down on his desk.

“The scriptures,” Rossiu said before the echo of the book’s settling had passed. “I’d like to know what they say.”

Rossiu hadn’t noticed that solid glower in Magin’s face had left until he placed his elbow on the desk and hid behind his hand. “I do not know,” he said through a sigh. “Rossiu, I cannot read.”

If nothing else, Rossiu could have sworn he felt his pupils constricting. His eyes burned. “Y-you—”

“—I gave the words my own meanings.”

For a while, Magin simply sat in place, holding his face in his hand and shaking his head. It always happened the same way. He jumped at the opportunity to fess up when he was caught. Weary, he crumbled, and begged for another tremor to reduce him to dust.

“It just happened,” he continued. “I poured over them. I made all of the text mean what I wanted it to mean. It was not a matter of…Creating a language, no…I saw things in it because I needed to. I cannot call it completely devoid of meaning, not for me. But I will understand if that is what you believe.”

Rossiu had to let the silence whitewash him. He watched Magin continue to say nothing and only clamp his fingers at his temples; Magin, trembling and desperate; Magin, illiterate; Magin, just like the rest of them. “Father…Then…” he covered his mouth and pinched his lips. Another moment, fettered, would give him the words he needed. “Then why did you say you would teach me to read?”

He slumped forward. “I am still every bit as vain as I was when I was young, Rossiu. I am terribly sorry.” His voice shook further after every sigh. “I thought that if I taught you the religion as it was practiced, and as it meant, I would not need to teach you the specifics of how to read. I thought I would read to you, and you would grow to see the same meanings in the words that I assigned.”

His knuckles had turned white, Rossiu could feel; as Magin spoke, he dug his nails tighter and tighter into his palms. He’d fretted to near-catastrophe when he thought he was the proud one. They could not afford pride. He heard it in Magin’s voice every time. Magin lived beyond his means.

He could do nothing more than let the Head Priest talk. “But I cannot expect that of you,” he said. “I cannot expect that of anyone. No one sees the same things the same way. You are a different person, Rossiu. I am sorry.”

If he was God—if he truly had the capabilities of some divine messenger like the villagers all longed for him to have—Rossiu would summon Kittan to his side to take over for him once again. But he’d played the metatron twice, once at Rossiu’s failing and once of his own accord. Rossiu had no right to keep asking this of the man who had already bestowed upon this wayward clergyperson everything he needed to know, even if his body or his escaping voice hollered the request.

So he was stuck. With nothing to say and no way to move, Rossiu could not look away from Magin. Old again. Older than he could have possibly truly been. Even if Rossiu could tear down the levees of social formality and ask how old he was, he’d never get a true answer. There was no sun underground; there were no days, no months, no calendar. How close to fourteen years old was he, actually, anyway? A bit more? Years less? Underground, age came as an assumption and an assignment. Magin doled himself out far more than he’d lived, greedy and hungry.

He had seen Magin just before Kittan did. He wondered how many years he’d aged since then, and how many decades corresponded to an hour.

What a pitiful man. He understood Rossiu now and lacked the energy to enjoy it. He’d replenish himself with atonement; how, though, would he keep going this time? Adai villagers starved themselves of nourishment and gorged on penance; he’d binged and his body purged itself of youth. Rossiu had always shared such a metabolism.

Rossiu felt himself loosen everywhere but his lips. He spoke with a terse diction, as if giving orders for a task that should have been completed hours ago. “…Will you still carry out the expulsion ceremony?”

“Until you return for us, Rossiu, we will do whatever we can to survive,” he answered. He let his hand drop from his face and thud onto the stone desk. The candlelight behind him reduced him to a profile in silhouette, a cameo. “The ceremony will be necessary until then.”

“Father,” Rossiu stated, stepping forward just an inch. He, too, began to shake his head now, and he watched Magin turn toward him. If he’d flog himself, the least he could do was keep the whip from hitting the others who followed behind him. “Can you promise me you will at least not carry it out in my name?”

“I cannot make that promise,” he replied. “For now, I must bend somewhat to the will of the villagers. If they want to associate you, or Agodego, with the expulsion ceremony, then it is better to just go along with it if I am to keep order here. I am sorry, Rossiu.”

He kept apologizing. Rossiu wondered if he’d be taking advantage of his piteous state, of his pleas for forgiveness, by making requests. He hesitated.

But he remembered when he’d pulled his hand from the stick that sent him to the Holy Lands—when he’d seen the mark. No one told him what to look for when he reached the surface.  When he saw his mother facing away from him in the stairwell just before the men pushed the boulder back into place, she looked up, unprepared for whatever could have greeted her. The cries of the reluctant from the other side and the yelps of joy from the most energetic of zealots alike sounded from behind the curtain of unknowing. There was no reason for them to leave ignorant. If they only knew. It had always been Rossiu’s job to remember. He straightened himself up.

“…Then at least tell them to look for Team Gurren,” he said. “I will be with them.”

Magin nodded. “I can do that.”

But he said it with so little enthusiasm, such a bare minimum of passion that Rossiu hung his head just when Magin did. And without realizing he heard his own voice, he said, “I am sorry all of this happened.”

 “I know,” Magin answered. Rossiu had started tickling his lips, as if they tingled, with his fingers. They misbehaved so often. Meanwhile, Magin huffed over his own thoughts, and sent them scattering until they broke apart. “I never meant for you to leave our village. But perhaps it is better that you did. Our people would never believe that it would be possible to live freely on the surface if anyone but you said so.”

Rossiu halted long before he could tell why. But it bounced from his ears to his brain and back to his ears again, and he blinked. “…I beg your pardon?”

Magin leaned forward, elbows now in his lap. “Maybe any of our people could have been our savior. But everyone has always respected you—”

“No,” Rossiu shook his head. “What…What do you mean, you never meant for me to leave?”

There, Magin stopped, and he cemented himself in place, with the same blank film spreading from his eyes to the rest of his face. With one constriction of his body, he etched the suspicion into his marble effigy.

“Father,” Rossiu repeated.

Magin peered back up at him, jaw clenched tight, all light in his eyes focused in a shocked dot Rossiu could have picked from miles away.

“D-did—”

“I have spent over ten years teaching the people of this village not to succumb to sentimentality,” Magin said, staring into his lap. “Not to hang on to the people they love, because there is no assurance that they will stay. That if we grow too attached, we will only hurt more and our equal footing will be destroyed. And I am the most sentimental of all.”

Rossiu stepped back.

“After your mother was expelled, I could not bear the thought of the same happening to you, especially once you became my apprentice. What happened the day you were chosen was an accident I still cannot explain.”

His stomach wrenched as if squeezed in some ethereal fist. It screamed for him.

 “Until then,” he continued. “I thought I had made peace with any of the regrets I may have had. I am a hypocrite. I deserve this.”

Magin had sent people’s fathers, and mothers, and children to the surface to die instead of Rossiu, one of any number of a revolving stable of orphans. And Magin knew. He understood. He let himself age for it. He pulled the strings and let them whip him closer to death.

“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

Magin looked up at him so quickly Rossiu thought for a second he saw the vestiges of youth that had to lurk behind the death mask of sacrament. He stared up at him, the most bewildered man Rossiu had ever seen.

He had to clarify. “I hadn’t even thought about how sad this village is until I went to the surface. Kittan and his sisters are not from a place like this. They loved their village. They did not have a face-god. They just got to be with the people they loved, so they grew up happy. But Adai is so sad. Don’t we know anything else?”

Magin’s lips parted to a sliver. He pulled them back into place before they could quiver.

“But this is my place,” Rossiu stated.

He felt himself shaking his head again, and then he rubbed his dry, wide eye with the back of his hand. He breathed to set his shoulders back in place. He stood as tall as he could. “That is what I meant when I told that beastman that I am Rossiu of Adai Village. I am not going to live the rest of my life knowing my place is so sad.” He grew light. “I am going to make the surface a place for all of us here to live. Me and Kittan and his sisters and Team Gurren and whoever else we can find. We won’t need ceremonies or scriptures or anything like that. You will not have to do what you are doing anymore.”

Rossiu, leader of the sad. But he bit down on the inside of his mouth, and if he twisted his lips properly, he felt them mouth what he’d meant. If he was going to call himself the savior of Adai Village, and say that he meant it, he would have to do it. His stomach turned and he breathed it back into position.

_Quit bein’ an idiot._

“I will make an honest man of you, Father,” he said. “I will come back. I will bring you all to a place you deserve to be.”

Rossiu’s posture was a magnet that brought Magin up to sit straight. There, they eyed each other for a moment, still, in the candles that gave the room, the village, their skin, the murky yellow-gray glow of sad, subterranean centuries. The air could have fallen to the ground and avalanched from the weight of the dust that floated in it. The opening to the surface hadn’t cleared it yet. The Head Priest rose to his feet with a long breath of particulate through his nose.

“I think the surface is holier than you give it credit,” he bowed his head, eyes shut, barely grinning. “When you come back, I think I will be able to tell you about when I went there.”

Rossiu couldn’t bring his smile to anything more than a pair of reserved tails at the corners of his lips. “I would appreciate that.”

“You may bring Kittan with you, if you wish,” Magin added. “I am certain our people would like to see him again. I would, too.”

“…Really…?” Wherever the shock came from, he couldn’t be sure. He’d tell Kittan later.

He nodded, once, slowly. “Of course. I am glad I met him. I am glad  _you_  met him.”

Rossiu made a wiggling half-smile out of a full-body surge of squirming delight. He felt it in his face.

Shaking his head, Magin laughed a restrained laugh, siphoned from years behind a dam. “There’s so much I don’t understand,” he said. “Never stop trying to learn, Rossiu. You do not want to end up like me.”

So he gave him the scriptures, because they said nothing of a savior.

And they refilled the hole Agodego left behind.

They let Kittan pick up Gimmy and Darry and swing them into quick farewell hugs.

They waved goodbye from the common hall when Agodego and King Kittan scaled the walls back up to the surface.

As long as Rossiu left, now, to fulfill his word and never backtrack, to stick close by Kittan’s side, to return when all was well, he’d end up as nothing more than their savior, for a few minutes before they stepped into the fresh air and crowned the sun as their new, deserving god.


	15. 15

It lay drenched in stale blood, thick and congealed, matting its wool into filth. Only one day, perhaps, under the sun had done it a terrific injustice. Kittan leapt from his mecha’s cockpit and jogged to its side. From inside Agodego, Rossiu watched while he ran his hand through its fur. Kittan couldn’t shut his mouth. Rossiu kept his hands in place over his own.

Nothing could excuse the death of Kittan’s nakibashiri. When Rossiu finally brought himself to depart from Agodego, he couldn’t tell if it had been maimed, or shot, or thrown, or crushed. It lay dead. Just dead, as much a marker as the gaping hole in the ceiling of Adai that both Kittan and Rossiu as well as a beastman had passed through. But no cries of “human scum,” no grudge against every intelligent being with naked skin, no won bragging rights of racial superiority, could contribute to a justification of the animal’s murder. All the belongings Kittan and Rossiu hadn’t needed in the village lay scattered on the ground around it, still near the jutting slabs of rock that marked Adai’s entrance. It hadn’t moved. It died as faithfully as it had lived.

Kittan shivered over its corpse. He moved once, then again, to try to touch it, his hand jolting back every time. Rossiu kept his hands clasped at his front while he moved around to stand by his side. He surveyed the nakibashiri. It lay on one side. Its tail sat limp on the ground. Its flat teeth peeked out from its mouth. Long white fur hid its eyes as it had in life. Were it not for the generous slather of blood enveloping its side, it could have been asleep, slipped so into the deep crevasse of unconsciousness that its chest showed no sign of an expanding and deflating set of lungs.

The nakibashiri had never had much of a regal aura about it. None of its species did. Rossiu could liken them to nothing but a family of cotton puffs blustering indolently across the desert, ever since the first time he saw them outside the Black Siblings’ erstwhile headquarters. But they’d always done their jobs. They carried people and things. They guarded their riders. They only needed food and water; a grateful comb through its coat solicited a guttural, whining purr, a sound only pleasant if one knew its meaning. It died for its job, for its lot in life, for the nature of its being. Rossiu bent down, reached out, and brushed his knuckles against its blood-solid fur. It was the temperature of the air. What prayer could he offer?

Beside him and to no one in particular, Kittan threw his head back, hands over his eyes, and cried, “ _Fucking shit_!” and Rossiu jumped at the volume more than the sentiment.

“What the fuck?” Kittan added, hollering still, head tilted, trying not to ask the clouds overhead. “Really? Fucking— _really_?”

Rossiu shuffled a little toward his side. He murmured Kittan’s name just before putting his arms around his waist. His head nudged against his side. Kittan didn’t move. His hands, stuck on his eyes, slid back to push through his hair, and he groaned, loudly, from his chest.

“We should give it a funeral,” Rossiu said. He’d started rocking to and fro a while before and hadn’t yet stopped. “Don’t you think?”

“Fuck,” Kittan moaned. His hands dropped, and he placed one on Rossiu’s shoulder. “How, though? Can’t bury him, it’s too fuckin’—not—goddamn deep enough here, Adai’s right there,” he pointed toward the ground underneath the feet of King Kittan and Agodego, ending the gesture with a shrug. “I don’t wanna—can’t—not gonna drag him somewhere else. Fuck.”

Burial. Rossiu’s eyes fell on the nakibashiri’s body. Adding sand and soil to the death film that covered it. He’d never understood. He broke away from Kittan, leaving only an inch between them.

“We don’t bury our dead,” he replied. “We do not have the room.”

“S-so whaddaya do?”

“Cremation. We burn the bodies. We always said the smoke could travel through the ceiling, and it would lift the soul up to the Holy Lands.”

Kittan answered with a grunt. He kept clenching his eyes shut, like the sun had grown brighter to assault only him, and he gestured wildly this way and that. “But we’re already up here. We—we probably lost our matches anyway, look at all this shit. Even if we find ‘em, we’re gonna need ‘em, so—”

“I want to give it a proper funeral.” Rossiu straightened his back and eyed Kittan. He could look hard enough for an answer, but if he spent enough time searching, he’d receive it as an gift.

And Kittan sighed. “Yeah, me too.” He stood still for a moment, then lifted his hand to his cheek and rubbed it, sighing once more. “Goddamnit,” he groaned. “God—fucking damnit, what’s the fuckin’ point of this shit? What’re they gonna get outta killin’ a nakibashiri?”

Rossiu wrapped his hand around Kittan’s wrist. “Here.”

He eased down onto his knees, still holding onto Kittan. Watching, frowning, Kittan hesitated before he followed.

Rossiu brought his hands together at his chest, just the way he’d shown Kittan before, and he waited until he heard him do the same.

He said nothing. They near-prayed in silence, a string of thoughts.

There had been so many times when Rossiu and Kittan sat together on the nakibashiri’s back. Rossiu could lean forward and feel its fur against his neck just as easily as he could lean back and feel Kittan up against him. When he learned to steer, it told him with every swerve that perhaps he hadn’t yet failed quite so spectacularly at surface life. For so many days straight just the three of them, all touching one another, merged into a colonial organism that traveled with no fuel but trust and desire. He imagined himself and Kittan traversing the desert together, yards apart, encased in their gunmen, where they couldn’t see or hear one another despite moving side-by-side, in speaking distance. A gust rustled the nakibashiri’s fur. Silly-looking, wonderful animal. They prayed with memories.

“He was the best nakibashiri,” Kittan said. “I don’t even give a shit. The fuckin’ best.”

Rossiu nodded.

Kittan stood first, eyes still on the dead creature. He broke away to begin gathering the scattered saddlebags. There would be a match in one of them; the search loomed both brutal and trivial. Rossiu got up to follow.

When he stood, he paused to look around. He’d wound up in that very spot once before, at night. In the interlude between its desertion and its death, the nakibashiri had to have seen the stars at precisely the angle Rossiu had. He wondered what it thought, if it thought. If it noticed. If it had a brain complex enough to trust Kittan and to know he’d be back for it anytime he left, it wouldn’t follow that it would merely accept the stars as things it saw. Rossiu certainly didn’t.

In his periphery he saw the rocky tower that held the cave. His cave. Unless a wayward beastman had not only chanced upon this obscure, desolate mote of dust in the vacuum of the whole sprawling globe, but decided to plunder it as well, Rossiu’s old poncho and bolero, and his backpack, not entirely gutted of provisions, sat to the last atom in the same position they had when the gunmen had grabbed him and forced Kittan and his sisters to his rescue. It had only been a month.

“Kittan,” Rossiu said.

“Huh,” he looked up, three smaller bags draped over his arm.

He pointed toward the rock, aiming for the dark splotch that marked the cave. “I think I know where we might be able to get a match.”

As a matter of merely completing a near-finished task, Kittan hurried to gather the last few bags strewn about the ground. He left them next to the nakibashiri’s body, where he hovered for another moment to nod at it. Rossiu followed close behind, and they headed back toward their gunmen. Even the brevity of the trip to the cave couldn’t guarantee their safety.

“You really think all your old shit’s still in there?” Kittan asked.

Rossiu nodded. “There’s no way it isn’t. What would anyone want with my old clothing?”

“I dunno,” Kittan shrugged. He reached for the bend in King Kittan’s knee and pulled himself up. “People need shit sometimes. You might wanna bring it, though, ‘cause, like…There’s some places where it gets cold. J-just saying.” He swung himself past the mecha’s teeth and into the cockpit. “I didn’t know you had matches. Huh.”

“Only some. I never ended up using them all,” he paused just before his gunmen’s feet.

Rossiu hadn’t gotten to look at Agodego fully in natural light. The stone that composed it seemed to have a much brighter hue than it had underground. Near-white, chalky, with a darker gray ringing around its legs and chin, a stain from years partially submerged. Its eyes, by some miracle, had opened and revealed two almonds of dull yellow. Agodego wore an expression as if it hadn’t even occurred to it that it had left, or that it had ever been held as a deity, or that it now basked in the warm glow that covered the earth from horizon to horizon. It would be at home anywhere. In subterranean miasma or in the true home of all its devoted, Agodego kept its lips tight and impartial. Rossiu climbed inside.

Agodego took its time. A cumbersome behemoth beside the damaged, yet still wiry and spry King Kittan, it lumbered. Rossiu watched King Kittan burst ahead, then pause to let him steer Agodego to catch up, then dart forward again only to stop and repeat. It dragged what could have been five minutes of silence to ten or so.

Ten minutes in which Rossiu longed to hear Kittan say something, anything, growl and trill whatever ‘r’ may have slipped into a word, or his name, just to break up the self-consciousness of lagging behind in his ancient vessel-weapon. He wanted to hear him groan out his impatience. He wanted the swears. He saw the walls around him and gazed out the reflective window to the landscape around, an awful tease. Kittan lay just ahead, inaccessible.

He all but tumbled out from Agodego when he arrived at the cave. Kittan already stood, hands in his pockets, at the entrance. He’d fallen blank. Rossiu, he took it himself, would lead. Kittan couldn’t bring himself to intrude in what had once been his home. Strolling past, Rossiu took him by the hand and brought him inside.

After a second to let his pupils dilate, he saw the poncho first. He smiled. “Look,” he chirped, wincing for a fraction of a second at the glee with which his voice sounded, but picked the garment up from the ground before he knew he’d reached it. He held it up for Kittan to see. One hand secured it by the lavender stripes on the left shoulder. He turned it around to inspect it himself. Just a light layer of dust coated it. He shook it off.

And for what he decided was old times’ sake, he put it on.

Initially, he’d taken it off for a reason. He felt it now. It was a heavy thing, woven from thick fabric that would withstand Adai’s underground chill; such weight had no place on the surface. He swung around in it for a moment, just once or twice, to feel it kick up the breeze around him.

Kittan just watched him. “Th-that uh…Yeah, you were right, huh?”

He strode past, eyes cemented to the shadowy objects immediately behind him. Rossiu spun around, the poncho following along. Kittan knelt beside the backpack; he moved to touch it, maybe pick it up, but looked back at Rossiu.

“How’s, uh…How’s it feel?” he asked.

Rossiu shrugged. “It’s very warm. Do you really think I’ll need something this warm?”

“You don’t gotta wear it all the time,” he replied, letting his hand alternately hover over the limp green bolero on the ground and balling it up in hesitation. “Oughta bring it, though, even if you just use it as, like, a damn—‘nother blanket, or somethin’. I dunno, up to you. Y-you should, uh—” the compromise, it seemed, was to just point at the bolero. “Take that, too.”

The easiest way, Rossiu thought, to carry all of his recovered garments would be to just wear them all. They’d have to carry the saddlebags the nakibashiri no longer could, after all. But the heat still penetrated into Agodego, he had noticed; he found himself picking up the other item and draping it over his forearm before he’d fully debated whatever it was he’d set out to debate.

In truth, though, he thought of nothing more than the weight of the poncho around his shoulders. Startlingly quickly, he’d grown accustomed to the light freedom of the air, of not covering up. It was a heavy thing. He’d sweat in it. It would halve any aerodynamics he may need. It had the blandness and the pressure of the village from which it came.

Rossiu sighed.

Pushing just so past Kittan, he got down on his knees beside the backpack. Inside, he’d had a knife, a very simple, somewhat blunt one for eating. He rooted through.

Kittan tried to move away, if only to give Rossiu the room for which he’d apparently grown desperate. He scratched his jaw. “Rossiu, what—”

“I’d rather not wear it like this, if I can help it,” he answered, pulling the knife from an interior pocket and setting the bolero on the ground. “It’s too warm.”

He positioned the knife in the poncho’s front slit and held the hem tight below. Tilting his head back, he made one careful upward slice. Some little victory squeak escaped his throat when he cut it; he heard Kittan make a noise as well, but before the poncho could slide off his shoulders, he caught both sides at his neck. What once had been a high collar ended up a knot between his collar bones. Rossiu pushed the rest of it back behind his shoulders.

“This feels better,” he said, and with nothing more to add, placed the bolero and the knife back into the backpack. He took a short peek into the front pocket and found a near-depleted, but not totally empty pack of matches.

He hadn’t really noticed how quiet Kittan had fallen until they started to leave the cave. Rossiu shifted the backpack on his shoulder. Every few seconds he glanced over at Kittan from the corner of his eye. Eventually luck prevailed. Kittan, at the same moment, had looked over at him, likewise sidelong, and he swung his head away as soon as their eyes met.

“Is something wrong?” Rossiu asked.

Kittan shook his head. “Nah, just—well, I mean, ‘course the damn—ahh.” After a moment, once they walked into the sunlight, he put his hand to his mouth and spoke through his fingers. “Just surprised you did that, is all.”

“Did what?” but it hit him while the words still came from his mouth. He reached back and touched the fabric of his poncho.

“Wearin’ it like a cape or somethin’,” Kittan said.

Rossiu, still clasping the knot at his collar, turned and tilted his head. “I am?”

“Looks l—uh—” a string of subsequent syllables settled into a bite down onto his lip. “Yeah, it—” and then he settled, it seemed, on a shrug. “Whatever, it just—you—heh,” he shrugged. “Kinda suits you, I guess.”

Perhaps he regretted it immediately. He scrunched his face into a wide-eyed frown before climbing back into King Kittan and shutting himself away. Rossiu fought a pleasant little jitter all the way back into Agodego. Trumping the ten minutes back to the nakibashiri, he listened again and again, and assumed a good thing. If it got him through the lonely task of piloting his gunmen, he could allow himself, this once, to overshoot. Only back on the surface, in a butchered Adai poncho, he could indulge.

But when they stood before the dead nakibashiri again, he fell back into fasting. Kittan tapped the ground again and again with his heel, playing some invisible drum, alternately exhaling loudly through a tightened mouth and wiping his face with his hands. Rossiu couldn’t pull the matches from the backpack; not yet.

“Would you like to say anything?” he asked, lacing his fingers into Kittan’s.

“Ahh, fuck…” When Kittan pulled his other hand away from his face, his eyebrows emerged even more mussed than usual, all disheveled. He shook his head, less a negative than a body tic. “I-I dunno, no. No, what the fuck do I even say? It’s—fuckin’—it’s just such  _bullshit,_ I can’t—”

He’d been furrowing his brows up and down all the while. Rossiu could resist no longer. He stood on his toes and straightened them with his thumbs. Maybe, he thought, if the symmetry could calm him, Kittan would relax a bit as well.

So, naturally, Kittan’s mouth bent both ways into his massive arcing frown, and he stared with eyes nearly all white, before he pursed his lips, grunted, and turned away. He hid behind his collar.

He looked nice, though. For an instant. As he retrieved a match from the backpack, he wondered what exactly triggered that frown each time it emerged. He couldn’t remember the exact words that preceded each occurrence. His eyes caught on the nakibashiri when he moved back up, and he forgot it all entirely.

Kittan couldn’t touch the match to its fur. Rossiu embraced him, letting his face squish against his shirt.

Cremating a body had all the foreignness of washing one’s hands back in Adai. It was so long ago. Rossiu had taken part in the funeral proceedings since before his age had climbed to the double digits. How many dead bodies had he seen begin to bubble and char? Of course he never stuck around long enough to watch the bodies deteriorate entirely; that had been Father Magin’s job. He stayed in the crematorium until he could safely emerge with only ashes in an urn. He supervised. Rossiu stayed outside to offer blessings to the family, who rarely knew how to describe their dearly departed as people. “He was a good man,” they would say. “He loved God.” But Magin watched the body, everything that ‘good man’ had once been, shrivel and scorch into powder. Every time. Rossiu wondered how necessary it had all been.

Rossiu was no Magin. He was no longer the future Head Priest. He wasn’t even a member of the congregation anymore. He took the match, lit it, and set the nakibashiri ablaze. Savior. He sighed.  _They are referring to me._

The wind pushed his poncho—his cape? What would he call it now?—blowing behind him. Even as he watched the fire expand from its blood-matted haunch to its back and its feet and its head, he remembered it below him. He felt its muscles extend and constrict, its fur wade on the breeze and knot under his thighs. He heard its warble echoing across the desert. He held onto Kittan all the while, even when he turned to look away. The smoke crept into the sky and the wind carried it over their heads. Gray tendrils of soul stretched above and before them.

“The best nakibashiri,” Kittan repeated. He took one last look at the burning mass of fur and turned around, eyes narrowed, mouth tight. He could only continue once he sighed. As ever, Rossiu would let him.

“I ever tell you about him?” he started. “Couldn’ta been older than you when I got him. Fuck, I’ve had him the whole time I’ve been up here. You know that? He was with his, like—fuckin’ family—his, whatever, he was with ‘em, and he was one of the bigger ones, but back then it was only ‘cause he was a fatass. His pack. I was goin’ for this other one but I ended up with him somehow. I wasn’t really thinkin’ about it ‘cause I was just tryin’ to show my sisters we could get ‘em and everything. Kiyal jumped right in like as soon as I realized what a fat piece of shit this guy was and she got this old one. Like,  _crazy_ old. She only had it maybe a month before it died on her. I dunno. And then later on Kiyoh got this younger one, but I guess it—pff, ended up gettin’ it on with my guy and popped out some babies. So she just left it, everything was cool. Ended up gettin’ another. Babies were cute as hell, wish you coulda seen. Looked like fuckin’—I d—pillows or somethin’. So goddamn cute, you’re gonna think I’m some kinda pussy, I love babies. Any babies. Kids. Goddamn. Adorable. Those kids in Adai, Gimmy and Darry? I liked them. Love that typa shit. Rossiu—shoot, someday—do you want—nnh—ahh, I’m—I’m g-goin’ on and on again.” He let out what could have been a groan just as easily as it could have been a laugh.

And then it faded to another sigh, and he took a short glance over his shoulder at the burning nakibashiri. “God, I can’t look at that shit.”

Kittan lied. Rossiu wondered how many funerals he’d actually had to attend; at a better time, he’d ask what funerals were like in Bachika Village, where the soil was deep enough to put a body to use.

But what a thing it was, such a phenomenon, that even death would bring Kittan back completely around, for a moment, to life. He’d never been able to stay too sad, Rossiu noted—even in the midst of his darker moments he couldn’t keep away from his sisters, or the things that had made him laugh, or that had made him happy. He liked to remind himself. And Rossiu, in his happiest moments, wandered back down into the murk of Adai, Adai before, Adai previously, the Adai about which he could do nothing.

They did the same exact things to mirror-image results. He watched Kittan move to rub dry an eye that had never truly watered. Once more he stood on his toes, and he pulled Kittan down into another embrace. They both needed it, Kittan because he lost something he loved, and Rossiu because he loved Kittan.

He loved Kittan.

What selfishness at a time like this to acknowledge it, with his arms around his shoulders and their faces pressed together, and a dead companion behind them, their burning mutual best friend. Maybe it all did suit him.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to remember him like that, either.”

He had a second to pause in the ether of silence before Kittan picked him up. He yelped, quite unaware of it, himself. Whether on purpose or from his weight, Kittan spun a quarter of the way around, holding onto Rossiu, whose feet dangled useless and stunned around his knees.

“You—are just—” Kittan swung him in the air for a second more before placing him back down, never completely letting go. “—My fuckin’ favorite. Goddamn, Rossiu.”

He would have asked what he meant, but by the time the dizziness, and the shock, wore off, he knew. He had nothing to say but, “You’re my favorite, too,” and they only broke apart to supervise the successful completion of the funeral. They sent the nakibashiri off with the simultaneous, resonant “Amen” that it deserved.


	16. 16

_There are things you must consider, Rossiu, before you make the decision to devote yourself to the priesthood. You must weigh absolutely everything before you can even think it a valid option for yourself. You are a child, I know, but these are things you must consider now. You are, at least, a very bright child. Forget your age. Leave yourself as an eight-year-old. Think of yourself at fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty…Ask everything of your future selves, and see if they can come to a consensus._

_You have already been separated from your mother. You have no other family. This is…We may call it ‘optimal.’ That you have no family from whom you must seclude yourself will help. But you have friends, do you not? Other children?_

_…Well, then._

_Can you sacrifice any opportunity at romance in favor of the love of God? We priests may not marry, Rossiu—we may not have relationships. You may not think much of it now; you are still very young. But if you have ever had a fleeting thought about someday growing up, meeting a woman, getting married, having children…It is not something we may do. Worldly love distracts from loving God. Remember this._

_That is what I would expect of an eight-year-old boy._

_Can you be alone: this is what I mean. Are you prepared for the meditation? Do you think you are ready to spend hours alone with your own thoughts? This is of utmost importance. This is the place where your connection with God is formed. You travel from one idea to the next. You think. He hears. He never responds, but he hears. Can you speak with someone you cannot readily hear in return? Can you listen to the sound of your own head thinking without tiring of your interior voice?_

_Are you listening to yourself think right now? It is never too early to befriend your thoughts._

_That is what you must do. You must make friends with yourself, Rossiu. Weigh every possible outcome. Accept your decisions. Make peace with them. When I am gone, it will be up to you; you may have an apprentice, yourself, but the thinking is all on you. The processes belong to you. Your thoughts belong to you. You are alone. Only God may enter your heart._  

Rossiu let Agodego lumber and sway, and it mesmerized him into a trance. He remembered and he forgot, and he ruminated and he awoke. It was quiet inside.

Very quiet.

He never quite paused, though. The interior of God had too many sights to study. The handles onto which he held flanked him like oars. He didn’t even have to grip them too tightly. He could lean back in his seat and simply rest his feet on the pedals and Agodego would still mosey behind King Kittan. Surrounded by walls the color of shadow, Rossiu found it far too tempting to let his body settle into place and nap. Autopilot. He had nothing to keep himself awake. He’d seen the landscape beyond the windows before.

God. Agodego could not be God. But no matter how many times Rossiu jolted up from a daze and told himself so, no matter how many times he banged into his head the name he himself had bestowed upon the craft, he called it God.  _I am moving God,_  he scorned himself for thinking.  _Perhaps if I move the Face-God this way…_

But Agodego had picked up speed. Within hours, it grew apparent that Agodego’s languid footfalls of the morning were the remains of a kind of atrophy. It had grown tired and weak through years of disuse. And now, with Rossiu finally at its helm to shake it back to life, it groaned and creaked until its metal muscles could flex and stretch under its stone skin.

It was a favor. It was also a simple duty. Common courtesy; something he allotted to it because he’d bonded with it in a time of need, and now they couldn’t rid themselves of one another. They couldn’t bear to. He wondered if Simon had the same kind of hollow union with Lagann, or if Kamina did with Gurren.

They couldn’t, he decided. And promptly he wondered if Simon, wherever he was, at that moment, was looking at Kamina from that permanent distance, feeling the same way about him that Rossiu had grown to feel about Kittan.

He missed Kittan.

From the moment he’d stepped inside Agodego, after the nakibashiri drifted almost completely to smoke and they had to get going, he missed Kittan. He may have missed him since before that, even, a premature sort of longing, an agony for the inevitability of the journey. An hour back out into the desert, and Rossiu wanted to take Agodego back to Adai Village, if he could just sit with Kittan and be with him.

What a disgrace, though. Rossiu kept his eyes on King Kittan, crushed and scarlet up ahead, nothing like the man he loved. He could see through it, if he concentrated well enough. Inside, Kittan sat arrow-straight, attentive as he was smug; he’d claimed a gunmen for his own, as well, after all. He’d found himself at the head once again, so he’d keep his cobalt eyes locked on the world around. Meanwhile, pride surged through every capillary. He ran on it. Rossiu wondered what he thought. “Don’t gotta worry about shit at all,” he’d tell him, probably. “We got these now. Nobody can fuck with us. You told ‘em, Rossiu, damn, you’re Rossiu of Adai Village, right? ‘Course I understand prepos—pre—uh—precisely who you are.”

How rude of his body to awaken him before he even realized he’d fallen into another spell. He had no imagination. He replayed Kittan’s words before they’d climbed inside. Rossiu had never met anybody with a harsher knack for being right.

Rossiu of Adai Village, leader of the sad, resuscitator of the Face-God, following behind Kittan of the Black Siblings, wondering with equal ardor when he’d have to defend his property and his title and his village and whether it would be wise to inform Kittan of his feelings for him. If he tried, he supposed he could weave a correlation between the two. Maybe he’d feel more obligated to fight if he knew Kittan knew. Maybe they’d battle with even swifter synchronization.

Yet no possible scenario he could envision truly warranted him telling. He could walk along behind Kittan, with increasing speed, just loving him, and fight when necessary. He had all the experience to emerge successful at both.

Every hour dragged regardless. Rossiu wanted to bang his head against the wall, if it would only put him to sleep soon after.

Night. Where was night? The sun loitered overhead. It grew complacent and stubborn, inching across the sky from one end to the other at the urging of the blue sky around it. It didn’t want to set. When it finally started to, the far end of the horizon to Rossiu’s right darkened long before the rest of it. A sheet of charcoal clouds marred a furious expanse of violet and magenta. Within the clouds, streaks of light zipped and disappeared. A faint, low rumble echoed from the south across the ground like an angry sigh. What on earth could it be?

Rossiu could only stop Agodego if Kittan stopped King Kittan in front of him. He clutched the handles and turned, again and again, back toward the clouds. He heard himself make a noise, some kind of hybrid between a whimper and a growl and sigh. How loudly would he have to beg Kittan to stop for the night before he actually did?

Miles earlier, Agodego had started to jog. Rossiu couldn’t tell until the sun finally collapsed, as if taking its sweet time had worn it out even further, lazing at the tail end of an anemic marathon. By the time night fell, it ran.

But they never stopped. King Kittan kept running right on ahead, and Agodego, still lagging a ways behind, followed along. Rossiu leaned forward. All his efforts went into shoving his body into an aerodynamic, top-heavy torpedo; if he could just shift his weight into his hands, he could make Agodego run behind, and maybe, hopefully, catch up. They could travel side-by-side. If he could catch up and then stop, it wouldn’t be so bad to pull over and tell Kittan to give it a rest, please,  _please,_ he couldn’t do it anymore.

He had no problem with the sound of his voice inside his head. He had no problem with the travel, or the rocking of the gunmen as it moved. But he could entertain himself only for so long with repeats of old conversations and desperate imaginings of ones that could be. Kittan wasn’t God, either. He pushed. Agodego ran. King Kittan never stopped.

Hours after the sun fell, under the bright splash of stars lighting the night sky, Rossiu remembered they hadn’t even eaten. Only once, in the morning, when they left Adai Village, a cycle of life and rebirth ago. His eyes grew tired. If his stomach had protested at all in the day, he’d missed it, and it had given up accordingly.

What about Kittan, though? Kittan had to be hungry. Or tired. Both. Something had to be wrong. Rossiu felt his fingers wrapped around the handles and wondered if maybe Kittan had leaned, too, just leaned forward until he lost consciousness, either from hunger or fatigue or heat or anything worse Rossiu had no choice but to imagine. King Kittan would have just kept on running, unaware that anything could have possibly been the matter.

They didn’t care. The gunmen didn’t care. They were machines. Beastmen had built them, beastmen who likewise didn’t care. Gunmen were tools. And Rossiu picked himself up, head heavy with a hissy-fit that would explode through in moments. Agodego had lied to him. There had been no bond. Who could bond with a machine? What kind of logic assigned a soul to a robot? He prepared it to stop.

King Kittan stopped first. For the sake of what had to be common sense safety, Rossiu steered Agodego to follow it into the ravine and parked behind it. Its eyes, and Agodego’s eyes, lit a violet boulder on the ground. The four-day journey to Shoubou Village had taken less than a day.

Ever since Agodego lurched to a halt, Rossiu felt a smack of dizziness, and it echoed around in his head without ceasing now. He stood. After hours, his weight finally rushed back down into his feet, and his blood flowed freely, and he almost had to sit back down. It seemed that every time he went to exit Agodego, he ran the risk of collapsing. He lost his balance. Perhaps it was the height—more than likely, though, he was tired and starved—but he moved like a startled worm on the way out. Each step felt as if it would send him careening down the steep side of the gunmen. Pangs of hunger that had spent most of the day dormant rose again to fog his vision. He couldn’t see the ground below.

“Just jump, Rossiu.”

He had to shut his eyes for quite some time in order to stand a chance of seeing when he opened them again. In the time it had taken for Rossiu to stumble over to the open mouth of Agodego and hover in place, Kittan had exited King Kittan and made his way over to the ground below him. He stood with his hands held high in the air. “I gotcha,” he said.

Without a moment to grab any of his bags, Rossiu stepped as close to the edge as he could and sat down. He still had to push himself over. He landed in Kittan’s arms, already prepared to wrap his own around his shoulders.

If Kittan really did give him the light squeeze he could have sworn he felt, he made up for it by placing him down on the ground immediately after. Rossiu had neither the energy nor the wits about him to say anything. Kittan took him by the hand and led him toward the purple stone.

“Shit, Rossiu, sorry ‘bout that,” he said. “I didn’t think that was gonna take—well—I dunno. Thought it was gonna be shorter, then I thought it’d be longer, and then I was like, ‘wait, no, there’s that—fuckin’ thing—the damn—we’re almost there, why not just keep goin’?’ Didn’t wanna stop if we didn’t hafta. Guess we shoulda, though, huh?”

Rossiu rubbed an eye, letting out a blank, quiet hum. Any thought that had crossed his mind while inside Agodego fluttered away the moment he felt Kittan catch him. Wobbly footsteps sent him swaying against Kittan’s side while they descended the staircase into the village.

“We’ll get some food and—the—all that,” Kittan said. “Shit, I don’t even know, haha, I’m so hungry. Don’t let me do that ever again, alright? Fuck.”

He bumped into him again. Of course he wouldn’t let him.

Through a veil of fatigue, as if recognizing vaguely something in waking about which he’d earlier dreamt, Rossiu noticed how similar the descending staircases into Shoubou and Adai were. He wondered if every village had the same layout. He’d only been to two, after all.

How similar could the world be? He watched Kittan knock on the boulder that hid Shoubou from the slightest hint of light above, and he looked back.

“Are you sure Agodego and King Kittan will be safe without us?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it, I got a plan,” Kittan replied. He let Rossiu’s hand go only to place his arm around his shoulder. Rossiu still couldn’t quite keep himself completely vertical.

The boulder rolled out of the way to a roaring cheer. How lucky the Shoubou villagers thought themselves to receive two visits from the Black Siblings in such a short period of time! Their chief, the aging but solid-bodied man for whom the relatively new village was named, led them inside. He ran through the how-are-yous and what-can-we-get-yous before asking, with a tilt of his head and a squint of his eyes, “Where are your sisters, Kittan?”

Kittan looked down at Rossiu, who only blinked slowly once. He’d hardly heard over the cacophony of the other villagers, the girls screaming for Kittan to look at them, the boys muttering to one another the same question, the children goggling open-mouthed. He couldn’t tell if he thought any words; if he did, the crowd drowned them out.

Before Rossiu even processed it himself, that Kiyoh and Kinon and Kiyal had, of course, been sent off with Team Gurren, Kittan straightened his back and turned to the chief once again. “They’re fine. How ‘bout we get some food and we’ll tell everyone about it, huh? Been a long-ass day.”

Just barely out-of-synch with the true time of the world, Shoubou Village had been just about to prepare dinner when they arrived. The cooks hurried off, and the villagers most eager to be hospitable led the two of them to the dining area, surrounded by a cloud of people hanging on to hear any and every word they may speak and every motion they may make.

Guests were always served first and seated at the head of the dining hall. Rossiu stared at his plate of vegetables in unqualified astonishment when a very young girl chef placed it before him. They’d remembered his diet from his last visit.

They remembered his name, too. “Here you are, Rossiu,” the chef said. He gazed first at the food and then at her, and then back at the food, and so on. He’d never fallen so hungry in his life, and yet he sat there, unable to lift a utensil to the plate or to thank her.

And she just stood there. She smiled tightly, eyes wide, waiting. She pulled a lock of her wavy grass-green hair around to her front and ran her fingers through it. Rossiu looked to his side, where Kittan sat on his end of the bench trying to talk to a group of older girls and eat at the same time.

He looked away immediately. “Thank you,” he said, and focused on eating. He could make himself feel better if only he’d wake up. His blood needed the nourishment. He didn’t know when the chef girl decided to leave; only that he looked up and she’d disappeared.

Once he’d eaten half his food he began to eavesdrop. It hadn’t started out as an intentional venture. He heard it, and it grew louder, and then he couldn’t help but hear it. Kittan spoke elusively. He wouldn’t directly answer the girls’ questions, or refer to them as individuals. “You,” he said. “You girls.” “You guys.”

Just leave him alone, Rossiu thought. He wants to eat. Look at him.

He decided to listen to himself chew, nevertheless. Only once, when he felt a presence on the side of his face, did he look over; Kittan’s head swung around but his eye lingered in place. Rossiu could finish in comparative peace.

Rossiu saw the shapes of the girls scattering away from Kittan before he heard anything that would have triggered it. But a second later, Kittan’s shadow fell upon him.

Kittan whistled. When silence fell, he brought his fingers away from his mouth and looked down at Rossiu. He grinned. Rossiu felt himself follow as Kittan pulled him up onto his feet.

“Who here,” Kittan said. “Wants to live on the surface?”

Bewilderment bounced from the face of one villager to the next until they’d all had more than their fill. Some whispered. Rossiu glanced around to try to watch their lips. He saw ‘of course’ again and again, ‘what’ once or twice, ‘crazy’ more often than was comfortable.

“We can live there,” Kittan continued. “We just gotta take it back from the beastmen. Me and Rossiu, we—there’s these—we know what we gotta do. Right?” He looked down at him.

Rossiu looked back up at him. Though a bit more flustered than Rossiu would have guessed, Kittan grinned, holding his hand steady at his back until he clutched at the fabric of Rossiu’s shirt. He released it soon after. Rossiu looked out at the villagers.

Any more than forty-nine pairs of eyes on him gave him a chill. It had always been sort of a haunting thing, through the silence, watching being watched, aware of his necessity. One wrong word would leave him spending years trying to clarify, to simplify, to retrace his steps and hope for a way to make up for whatever filth had spilled from his mouth. It was his job to say the right thing.

To forty-nine people. How many were here in Shoubou? What weight did he have to carry now? Rossiu stared back, hands tightening. He tried to count the people sitting there, waiting for him, depending on him for some kind of answer. Behind him, Kittan gave his shirt another grab. He inhaled.

“The gunmen,” he began. “You are aware of them, are you not?”

The village answered with a fugue of affirmatives. He could breathe. One less thing; one necessary thing.

When he straightened himself, he felt Kittan’s hand leave his back. “Kittan and I met some people from another village. They call themselves Team Gurren. Kittan’s sisters are with them now. Their leader’s name is Kamina. He has managed to steal a gunmen. I did not understand it at first, but…He calls it Gurren. Another boy in their group, Simon, has a gunmen, as well, and he calls it Lagann. They can combine into an even more powerful gunmen. It’s—”

Were it not for the cacophony of amazed hushes sweeping the room, Rossiu could have continued at just the same volume. Uncomfortable, he strained his voice to rise, in the process losing his train of thought.

But the villagers kept glancing at one another, whispering amongst themselves. Rossiu narrowed his eyes; if they were only going to speculate with one another, he supposed it didn’t matter much where he picked back up. “—Kamina plans to lead them to the headquarters of the beastmen. They are going to fight and try to reclaim the surface for humans. It makes perfect sense! Using the enemy’s weapon against themselves, and—”

“—and me and Rossiu got some of our own!” Kittan cried. Rossiu looked over just in time to see him bristle, grinning, in time with a flourish of gasps. “We went all the way back to Rossiu’s village—they had—there was this gunmen down there, been down there forever, and we got so goddamn lucky, this gunmen followed us down there and attacked and it almost killed me but Rossiu hopped in—he calls it Agodego, ain’t that cool? You get to make this shit up—Rossiu hopped in Agodego and saved my ass from this guy, and then I came in and took the other guy! King Kittan, that’s what I’m callin’ mine. And King Kittan and Agodego are sittin’ right up on the surface just outside here right now!”

Kittan stood tall and proud as if each gasp and utterance from the villagers were a jewel all for him. He’d dived from Rossiu’s start into a treasure chest. Amid the glittering murmurs one younger man raised his voice, amplifying his cynicism more than his volume.

“How?”

Kittan squinted, moving his head in an attempt to find the source, but gave up shortly after; still, he spoke through a sneer. “How what?”

The speaker still kept himself hidden in the throngs. “How do you pilot them?”

“We just can, what’re you gettin’ like that about it for?”

Rossiu could step in. He edged nearer to Kittan’s side, looking out at the crowd as a whole, and spoke to everyone to accuse no one. “It’s strange. I simply did what Kamina and Simon said. I got into Agodego and it just felt like I knew. Kittan, you felt the same way, didn’t you?”

Retracting a slack-jawed threat, Kittan eased up, if only to evaporate into a mild daze. “I—yeah. I just got in and—that’s exactly what Kamina said. You get in and you know. S’all there is to it.”

“So…” a different boy spoke up this time, a more curious one. Without snide skepticism in the way, Rossiu watched as Kittan’s body relaxed to listen. “…Do you need us to help?”

How easily the plans all fell into place. Rossiu looked over once again at Kittan, who begged to him, kept on begging, with a wincing, silent mouth.

If he only had to support Kittan, Rossiu could speak with ease. “We’re raising an army,” he said. “So anything will help. Any kind of technical support, I suppose, or anyone who can do any kind of fighting. Absolutely anything. We will take back the surface by any means necessary.”

Chief Shoubou, seated at the far end of the table at which Kittan and Rossiu sat, stood up and bowed his head toward them. “I definitely wish you two luck, you and this Team Gurren, but I’m not sure we’re ready to help you right now.”

Kittan, bearing his weight on the hand he’d plastered to Rossiu’s shoulder, leaned over him. “What? Why not? We’re gonna go get the surface back! You don’t wanna help with that?”

“It’s not about what we want and don’t want to do, Kittan,” the chief said. “Of course we want to help. But we’re an artisan village. We paint. We just don’t have the kinds of weapons we’d probably need to get any beastmen out of those gunmen, or just to defend ourselves, for that matter. Until we can get some weapons together, we’ll have to stay underground. It’s for our safety. You understand, don’t you?”

Rossiu wondered how much longer Kittan intended to use him as some kind of handlebar before either his shoulder gave out or Kittan stared at anything but the chief, eyes trembling under heavily knitting brows. Shoubou was an artisan village, a place for creation. It was too familiar. He had to worry.

They hadn’t come to Shoubou with a real, spoken plan set in stone; they would raise an army, that was all. They’d travel from village to village and recruit as many willing men and women as they could and eventually meet up with Team Gurren at or near the capital, surprising them with the gift of an infantry. The logistics, though, the specifics—anytime Rossiu found himself losing sight of the details he longed for a mirror. He couldn’t remember how he looked.

But Kittan still got so upset whenever a village wanted to look out for its well-being for the foreseeable future. Rossiu himself couldn’t be sure, were he still in his village, if he would have wanted to gamble the lives of the healthiest and most eager recruits of Adai on the charismatic delivery of a blue-haired thief in his dead father’s cape. If he hadn’t met Kamina in person, he definitely wouldn’t.

With a sigh, Kittan let his hand back away from Rossiu’s shoulder. “…Nah, I gotcha. I get it. I’d do the same thing, probably,” he shook his head. He peered out at the villagers that filled the dining hall, scanning the faces of each and every one of them. After a moment, though, his face stiffened, and the corners of his mouth curled up. “None of you guys would happen to know where’s the nearest village, then, wouldja?”

“Well, I actually come from Hatedai, but that’s mighty far away,” a rough-looking middle-aged woman, skin red with sunburn, pushed herself up from one of the tables. “Just ended up here a while back after the beastmen raided us. Didn’t destroy Hatedai, last I heard, thank goodness, but I got right lost. Been out here a long time, though, seen a lot. Closest I know’s Littner, probably a good week’s nakibashiri ride straight east and a bit to the north, and Jiiha’s right next door. After that, I ain’t quite sure. But I’m gonna be headin’ outta here soon enough, and I’ll let everybody I find know.”

Jiiha. The birthplace of Team Gurren. Rossiu and Kittan glanced at one another out of the corners of their eyes.

The chief, too, nodded. “When we’re able to get out, we’ll do whatever we can for you. I’m not sure about this Team Gurren, but I know we’ll all do whatever we can for the Black Siblings. And if there’s anything you need right now, just ask.”

Whatever trace of a smile Kittan may have had melted downward into the sludge of his flustered frown. He fought to turn it upside down, and through a second’s worth of stuttering, he told him, “Th—well—thanks, I—this. This is my typa village. Y’know…”

He looked down at Rossiu at just the moment Rossiu fell victim to a sniper yawn, too sudden to stifle. Kittan held up a hand to perhaps wrap it around his arm or place it on his shoulder again to drag him close, but he let it drop. Rossiu covered his mouth. It killed all of Kittan’s attempts to wrangle his lips into a passable shape. Anything, anything, he would have done anything to just bring him close and tell him he wasn’t bored and he had no idea where it had come from. Kittan thought he thought him boring. Horror of horrors. Kittan turned back to Chief Shoubou, and all Rossiu could do, then, was to watch and listen as he addressed him once more.

“…If it ain’t too much to ask,” he said. “Get Rossiu somewhere to sleep, and then maybe you guys could help our gunmen out.”

The least—as well as the most—the villagers could do was bring them down and give them a thorough paint job. But Rossiu, before being ushered away to the dormitories at Kittan’s insistence, rejected it. Though he pictured the deep ring staining Agodego, and though he entertained the image for a millisecond of sitting inside a shining, pure white gunmen that traversed the desert slowly, like the moon across the sky, he couldn’t accept it. Just bring it inside, he said. Agodego would wear its stain and its faded hues like tattoos. Agodego was Adai Village’s flagship.

In a strange way, as he sat alone in a guest bed that was far too large, wrapped up in his blanket like a little present, it made Rossiu wonder where Kittan had gotten his scar. That big fleshy-pink X slashed across his upper arm, just kind of a part of him. Rossiu had seen it every day since they met, but he’d never asked about it.

He wondered when Kittan would get back. He’d come to the same room, right? Just like in Adai? He buried his face into the folds of the blanket. The day had lasted a century. Earlier, when they burned the nakibashiri and watched its soul-smoke soar off into the sky, Rossiu thought briefly that he could possibly cope with the silent distance, the envelopment by the gunmen. But not even a whole day had passed, and now he sat feeling decades older just for having lived through it. And he had barely gotten to talk to Kittan, or be with him, and he gripped the blanket until he felt his fingertips pressing against the heels of his palms and he told himself to breathe. He told himself to breathe. Calm down. What are you thinking about? Why? How old are you?

Smack in the middle of reminding himself that he didn’t know and couldn’t answer, the door creaked open. He rolled onto his other side.

“Shit, I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Kittan asked.

He shook his head. Kittan stepped inside, closing the door on his way. A silent breath flowed from his nose, and he smiled. “No. Did they get them underground?”

Kittan nodded a second before pulling the bottom of his shirt out from under his belt. “Yup. Started—ffh—” he wrestled his shirt over his head. “—paintin’—ngh—King Kittan, too.”

In the dark, Rossiu didn’t have to avert his eyes. “Gold?”

“Yup. Got a pretty good look at him,” he leaned against the stone wall to remove his boots. “Gonna look badass as hell once we find somebody who can fix him up all the way.”

Rossiu didn’t realize—not entirely—that his vision had more than adequately adjusted to the dark until Kittan stood at the side of the bed in his underwear only, his pants and shirt draped over one arm while he surveyed the room for somewhere to leave them. Rossiu rolled back over to hide his face in the pillow and kept it there until he heard a shuffle of cloth and felt the mattress sag to his side.

“…Man, I’m tired.”

It never mattered what inane, insecure mosquitoes of thought may have buzzed around Rossiu’s brain and bitten him, or how many itchy welts of grief kept him scratching and awake, by the time Kittan fell beside him into whatever they used as a bed and held onto him. Rossiu held back and forgot every time. Everything melted away. Kittan was back.

Sinking into place, Rossiu murmured only partially hearing himself, “I haven’t ever told you how nice this feels, have I?”

Kittan’s head bobbed back; Rossiu felt his nose leave his forehead.

“Being alone with you,” he affixed. Clarify, clarify, for the sake of all that was holy, clarify. “The whole time we were out traveling, I…It was nice getting to talk with you all the time.”

“Yeah. Real nice,” Kittan replied. “I like it.”

What a relief. Rossiu smiled for only a moment before it faded away. “…I missed it today. It was rather lonely.”

“I know, wasn’t it?” Kittan exclaimed. “Hope we can figure somethin’ out, that shit’s gonna drive me crazy. I was tryin’ to find the damn…The loud-thing all day so I could yell over at you, but I never figured out how the fuck I gotta work it. I found the radar thing, though, so we can at least figure out where the capital is. You find yours?”

Anytime Kittan decided to talk and talk, Rossiu could ride the wave. “No.”

“Ahh, oh well.,” he sighed. “No big deal. You’ll just have to follow me. Wasn’t like we’re plannin’ on breakin’ up anytime anyway.”

He said nothing for a moment, then, “Uh.” Rossiu waited for something more, something, perhaps, in the purest sense of it, meaningful, but Kittan fled the subject with a span of silence.

He breathed. Rossiu listened, and from the depths of somewhere in his consciousness, he remembered something.

“…Did you see those clouds?” he asked.

“The—the lightninging ones?” Kittan shifted his head against the pillow. “Havin’ the lightning. Fuck do you call it.”

And Rossiu shifted against him. “Is that what those lights are called?”

“Yeah. Means there’s a thunderstorm goin’ on. Way out there,” he took his hand off Rossiu’s side to gesture as he spoke. “Thunder’s that real loud noise, y’know, the fuckin’  _boom_  everywhere. Rains wherever it’s goin’ on. They don’t happen too much out here in the desert. I been places where—remember I told you about rain? When water comes outta the sky? I been places where it rains tons,” and he brought his hand back down, right above Rossiu’s hip. “Crazy.”

“Amazing…” Rossiu imagined what it would be like, standing under those dark clouds with the lightning tearing across them like stripes that lasted for moments only, letting little pellets of water accumulate to drench him. He heard the thunder. “Do you think there will be a thunderstorm here?”

Kittan shrugged. “Maybe. Never know.”

“I wonder how rain feels.”

Kittan ran his hand up from Rossiu’s hip to his back, and he stopped it at his shoulder blade. One hand covered nearly all his back. His fingers bent. Rossiu felt them trace a set of lines across his skin until they settled on clutching the back of his shirt, and they stayed there. Kittan breathed in. His body pressed against him, and he braced himself, emerging narrowly victorious against a shiver.

“It’s weird,” Kittan muttered. “Every time we’re with other people, in these big—groups or whatever, it’s like—I dunno, feels like you’re a million miles away or somethin’.”

“I know,” Rossiu answered. “I feel the same way.”

They were so close. Rossiu tried to move his fingers against Kittan’s back the same way Kittan had on him, but he trembled too much, and he balled his hand into a fist and left it limp against his skin.

“Weird here without my sisters,” Kittan said. He couldn’t notice something so inconsequential and unsuccessful. “Remember last time? Kiyal got all, ‘ick, boys,’ ‘cause she knew they were lookin’ at her. Does that every time. Doesn’t like boys. ‘Cept Kamina, I guess, or somethin’. I dunno what her deal is, bet all her tryin’ to be like me’s got her…Whatever. As if I can talk.”

He chortled. “…Kiyal. Love her.”

He pulled Rossiu in, and Rossiu held on around his back to help him with it.

“Girl was lookin’ at you,” Kittan said.

“Which girl?”

“With the damn, uh…” he snapped his fingers next to the back of Rossiu’s shoulder. “The little—chef girl. Brought you your food. With the green hair?”

“Oh.” Her. “Yes, it was a bit unnerving. But the food was delicious. You wouldn’t happen to know what those green leaves are called, would you?”

“…N-nope. Heh.”

Rossiu opened his eyes for just a split second. Nothing more than a result of trying to keep them closed for so long, and it gave him a view of Kittan, his own eyes closed, wrestling a smile back into a straight line. Kittan squeezed him. All the village’s walls, its ceiling, the knowledge of the gunmen looming in the shadows of the store room, disappeared, and in its place, Rossiu felt the night air of the surface as he settled into the mattress, smiling too, his bones a pure liquid. Nothing had changed. He fell asleep, breathing out when Kittan breathed in.

Rhythmic. He thought of the word when he woke up, and he kept it with him all morning, all while he and Kittan took turns bathing, and while they ate. When they guided the newly-gold King Kittan and Agodego to scale the tunnel down which they’d been dragged the night before, Rossiu tossed his cape around behind him, closing his eyes to feel the breeze it created against his skin. He let his hair move with the gunmen while they jogged across the surface, tickling his shoulders only to remind him of its presence. He looked out at passing vegetation and remembered the smell of each, the taste of some. He wondered if he’d dreamt waking up. Whenever he looked ahead at King Kittan, he imagined Kittan inside, as placid as his last glimpse of him before sleep. As tempted as Rossiu was to admonish himself for the silliness of it, he just couldn’t scorn the sight.

He dozed. When he dozed and jolted awake, he knew for sure he’d awoken that morning in Shoubou. They’d covered so much distance with so little effort. The sun passed high noon long before it should have, and kept going as if to make up for its agonizing haul the day before.

Up ahead, once Rossiu rubbed the nap from his eyes, he thought he could see a wide, dark lake. It gaped across a stretch of the desert like a toothless mouth, surrounded by nothing but boulders and sand. None of the other oases lacked vegetation the way this one did. Rossiu squinted.

And when King Kittan stopped ahead of him, he knew it was not a lake.

Here, in the middle of the hours of nothing between Shoubou and Littner, an open gap sat in the late afternoon sun just beneath a toppled pyramid of stone, something that may have once been a part of a mesa. Its rim had a dusty black coating that seemed to stretch down inside; Rossiu could only liken it to ash, and he couldn’t see into it. The entire structure sat like a hole burnt into a sheet of paper. He supposed he’d ask Kittan why they’d stopped here for lunch.

“Hey! Which general you with?”

Rossiu and Kittan turned their gunmen around the moment they heard the voice. From inside a gray, vaguely apelike gunmen, a beastman addressed them as peers, if without much in the way of tact. Where had it come from, the sky? Underground? They all had to shoot forth with such rude speed even in the company of others like them.

Generals. Rossiu narrowed his eyes at the gunmen as if it would allow him to see through it and focus on the beastman within. He’d nearly forgotten they seemed to have a hierarchy of sorts; Kittan and Kiyoh had told him the day they’d met that they spoke of a king. Generals, though—Rossiu wondered how many levels supported the beastman infrastructure.

“You gotta be with Guame,” the beastman continued, punctuating himself with a nasal snicker. “Figures. Tell him to stay outta General Thymilph’s territory, he’s already got me patrolling around here.”

Rossiu saw from the side King Kittan turn just slightly toward him, something like a search for assurance. If they stayed quiet, or, if necessary, offered a, “Roger,” the beastman would leave and they could escape.

The other gunmen, though, stayed perfectly in place. It tilted, peering, it seemed, around them, at the hole. “Heh,” it sneered. “Clear the way, lemme take a shot. Might as well, we wouldn’t wanna risk anymore rebels comin’ up, would we?”

It lifted its arm. Gladly, Rossiu began to steer Agodego to step aside, but before the first foot even rested out of the way, he heard a snarl, trilling, echoing.

Kittan poked his head out of King Kittan’s mouth. “Rebels, huh?”

And before the beastman even let its gunmen’s arm shiver out of alignment, Kittan was back in the cockpit, rushing forward.

Since he’d let out his first battle cry, way down in Adai, powered by a fit and a need, Rossiu had nearly forgotten that Agodego had been built for war. He’d given not a second’s thought to how, exactly, he’d use it. What had he even done back then? He swung its arm. He couldn’t even remember doing it. The rumble, though, and the shockwaves from the impact—he remembered the feeling—and even more clearly, the instinct that fueled him.

He leaned forward and sent Agodego sprinting to collide forehead-first with the beastman’s gunmen. When he thought he’d reached the point that would have let their bodies meet, he ran through air.

King Kittan had slammed sideways into the enemy gunmen and toppled them both to the ground, out of the way. Rossiu steered Agodego to a near-halt before turning. King Kittan ripped at the metal of the other gunmen’s body. It got to its feet, its newly-gilded surfaces dented and scratched already, and pulled the other gunmen up only to swing it into the air.

Rossiu had nothing to do. The beastman’s gunmen sailed back down only to be skewered by the sharp wedge that jutted from King Kittan’s head, which split in two a second later. Under a hail of debris that ranged from dust particles to whole meter-long fingers, King Kittan pulled its head back together, unscathed.

Whatever in the world that could have been about, Rossiu figured it was a matter that fell only under Kittan’s direction. He watched the dust clear, the last remnants of wires and sheeting scatter to the dust below. There were no signs of the beastman inside. His fingers trembled until they released Agodego’s handles.

When the air shed its haze, Rossiu saw King Kittan turn and take a step forward. Only tentatively, he reclaimed his grip on the handles. If Kittan had a plan, Rossiu would just have to sit and wait for his directions. But then, with a great burst of speed, King Kittan leapt, and a bright glare from the sun zipped up the crest of its spiked forehead as it disappeared into the hole in the ground.

With a gulp, Rossiu pushed Agodego forward. He closed his eyes. Down. His stomach lifted up into his chest, it seemed; he barely felt the air blowing his hair up. His head bobbed and his body collapsed into a jolt of heavy pain that disappeared the moment it began. He landed.

By some miracle, Agodego landed directly behind King Kittan. For one long second, Agodego settled down into the soil below, and Rossiu couldn’t get it to open up. He tripped onto his face when it finally did, and he picked himself up from the ground, wiping his mouth and his eyes all the while, and hurried to the side of King Kittan.

Kittan had already emerged. He stood in the shadows. Like a hand with fingers extended in a wave, his hair stole all the light. He said nothing. He didn’t move. Not even an eye darted down and to the side to give Rossiu credit for his presence. When his sight acclimated enough to the darkness, Rossiu could see Kittan’s lips part, his head shake, and, finally, his jaw drop.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Kittan,” Rossiu whispered. He stepped close to his side, treading softly over the uneven ground. Any misstep could send him crashing. “Are—are you alright?”

Kittan’s fingers curled, but extended right back into place. Rossiu could hear him breathe. He grabbed his hand with both his own. And Kittan looked around at the dark, through it, apparently able to see far more than Rossiu could, and shook his head at it as if somewhere in the shadows it had told him a lie and only now, years after the truth could have been useful, did it tell him so. He blinked. His hand squeezed around both of Rossiu’s until only a concentrated effort would break them apart.

His voice echoed off a wall so far away it may not have been visible even in light. “This is Bachika Village.”


	17. 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> of course this is where i left off

Kittan had ripped a decent-sized strip of fabric from the rolled sleeve of his shirt, tied it around the short sword he’d once attempted to teach Rossiu to use, lit it aflame, and tore back out of King Kittan, on into the empty black that had once been Bachika Village. Rossiu had to jog to keep up with him. Only a blazing, bobbing torch marked his path.

“Kittan!” he called, but Kittan, by then just a bow-legged silhouette, never stopped. He slowed. He slowed, but his boots clacked still against the ground, and Rossiu finally caught up with him, grabbing Kittan’s hand, in time to watch him hold the torch out to the darkness.

“Look,” Kittan said.

After he blinked, he could see. The fire exposed a colossal open hall, far, far wider than the commons of Adai, the rocks of the walls covered in a layer of ash nowhere near as thick as the one on which they stood. Tiny islands of chalky debris littered the ground, some rounded, some cylindrical. Rossiu could make out a skull, but couldn’t discern if the roundish object beside it was another. He swayed. A tunnel in the back of the room led to more darkness; in its mouth, a pile of miniscule bones, either an outstretched hand or a child’s ribcage, stood like a doorstopper.

Kittan didn’t say a word. He stepped forward, keeping his eyes on the ground. Rossiu followed along, clutching his hand.

The crackle of the fire and the soft footfalls through the ashes echoed through the room. They dodged bones, taking long steps over them. Stomach churning, Rossiu could think of no sound less appropriate than the crunch of an old, burnt bone under one of his boots, one of the boots that had once belonged to Kittan, that he may very well have worn back when the bones they strove to avoid were safely cushioned by muscle and blood and skin, and moved just as freely about as the two of them did now, when they had names, when Kittan knew them. He waited for the sound, but with caution, it never came. They crossed the room and entered the hallway on the other side.

Rossiu’s head began to turn up toward Kittan sans his own volition. He could never have moved so slowly if he’d set out to do it. Kittan’s expression revealed itself one feature at a time: his nose twitched; his lips, always parted, trembled just the smallest bit every few seconds, as if he considered saying something but his throat sent his voice on a detour; his eyes jittered between wide-open eyelids; his brows furrowed in every direction, the most readily visible movement on his face. Rossiu could either say something or leave the matter alone.

But if Kittan wanted to talk, Kittan would talk.

The hall ended. On the other side, another titanic, ash-blanketed room stood open and waiting for them, stalactites and stalagmites nearly meeting as if grinning towards them with sharp brown teeth. Among the stalagmites, more skulls sat buried in the soot. Kittan yanked Rossiu’s hand, beckoning him to turn with him.

And there on the wall, like a king on his throne amid the mass of pointed rock spires on the wall, sat a huge white structure of some kind of crystal. It was a lumpy thing, but in the firelight, it seemed to sparkle. Rossiu guessed it at half the height of Agodego. He couldn’t move his eyes away from it.

“The Emperor,” Kittan said. Somehow his voice emerged deeper, throatier; less a raging, nasal snarl and more a husky growl. The trill remained. Rossiu listened. “That’s what we called it. We named all the fuckin’—the rock things we had in here, all the crazy ones. There’s a ton of ‘em down here.”

Rossiu still heard no expected crunch under his feet. He followed, and he waited for anything more to which he could listen.

In the next room, the wall to their right had been carved into dozens of giant cubby-holes. Rossiu peered inside through the glow of the fire, and found large, rectangular structures sitting inside each.

Beds. He saw the lumpy mass of a body in one.

To their left, a pillar the same sparkling white as The Emperor shot up from the ground and reached all the way up to the ceiling.

“That’s the Tower,” Kittan said, slowing to a near stop. “If you go around to the other side, you can see where the—uh—the fuckin’—I dunno who did it. Somebody a long time ago carved this big-ass hole in it and that’s where the chief got to sleep. Usually. ‘Cept every time we had one of those big parties, we always had this, like, contest thing, where one person—It changed every time. There’d be some game and somebody would win and they’d get to stay in the Tower until the party ended. My dad won one time. He had me go up with him one day. Crazy as shit how high it was.”

Rossiu looked on the ground below the tower. A ladder lay in skeletal fragments, barely close to what it had once been, among more bones.

He turned his eyes back to the floor. His stomach flipped. If he could coat his shoes in enough years-old ash, he’d prefer it any day to seeing that many pieces of charred skeletons frozen in a sea of soot. Kittan gripped his hand so tightly he almost couldn’t feel his fingers anymore.

Another hall led them to a room in which Kittan finally stopped. He turned to face a wall to their right and held the torch up to it. Hanging at the juncture of the ceiling and the wall was a drapery of shimmering ivory.

“Everyone got married here. ‘Cause it—I guess it looks like a veil, y’know? That’s what we called it, The Veil. Real original sonsabitches, ain’t we? Kiyoh always was talkin’ about getting’ married under it. Everyone said it was good luck. Everyone liked this whole room the best, ‘cause this is where we did the best shit. Cooked. Ate. Hung out. Did most of the shit for the party every whenever. There’s this, like, part over on the other—look—” he swung around and held the torch out to an elevated clearing in the middle of a patch of stalagmites. “That was our stage. Everybody would play there. Everybody played in this room. This was where the good shit happened.”

Kittan took only one step before pausing; in that moment, the side of Rossiu’s foot grazed against something rather flat, but it never made that crunch he expected. Kittan pulled him along after his moment of hesitation, and as they moved, Rossiu looked back at what he’d touched. A cylinder, covered in dust, one end draped with a taut skin of some manner. A drum.

The room had no other hall at the end of it, no passageway leading to another huge open space. Rather, it tapered off, the ceiling flowing down toward the ground, lower and lower. Still several feet above even Kittan’s head at the end of it, it ended in what Rossiu could only imagine was a set of stalactites perfectly symmetrical with the jutting structures below.

Kittan pulled Rossiu along to the side of the walkway next to it. He knelt down and let go of Rossiu’s hand only to reach out towards one of the stalagmites.

But his fingers pushed right through, and all the little towers of rock on the ground rippled and shimmered. He wiped the water from the pristine mirror lake on his knee.

“Never seen it that still,” he murmured. “We had other springs and shit we’d take baths in, so we all used to go swim in here. Had to be careful, though, ‘cause of the damn,” he pointed up at the stalactites. “Those guys. I came up for air one time and one of ‘em sliced me in the forehead. Thought I was gonna die, I was real little. Scar didn’t go away for a long time.”

There was a brief moment in which Rossiu tried to envision a young Kittan bleeding from the head, but even if he could have conjured up a Kittan who was little and small and not the tall, fit man he’d always known, he wouldn’t have had the heart to watch blood trickle down his distraught face. But then he remembered—the scar.

“Kittan,” he began, watching Kittan rise back to his feet. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get that scar on your arm?”

As if he’d forgotten all about it, Kittan lifted his arm and looked at it. “Oh, th—shit, Rossiu, nobody ever—goddamn. That,” he shook his head quickly and turned back to him, letting his arm drop at his side. “It was stupid. This damn—I dragged this chicken-lookin’ beastman out of his gunmen one time, business as usual, y’know, and I’m all, ‘where’s he at, you know where he is, I’mma kick his ass,’ and he just lifts up his big ugly chicken foot goes,  _slice,_ and this shit ain’t ever gone away. But it’s whatever. Just got a big badass scar, right?”

But he said it with little to no enthusiasm. His shoulders stayed slumped. Rossiu’s eyes trailed back to the water, still not back to its flawless stillness even after just one light touch from Kittan’s finger.

It was just a slow-motion double-take. He looked back up at Kittan, eyes wide and illuminated.

“You’re looking for the beastman who did this,” he said, kicking up a little cloud of ash with the toe of his boot. “That’s what you ask all the beastmen about every time we run into them.”

“You didn’t know that?” Kittan asked.

“I kept meaning to ask.” He hung his head. All that time, of all the things he’d meant to ask, and he could never keep that one in his head long enough to let the question slip. How inattentive did Rossiu have to be in his presence? “What do you know about him?”

“Fucker’s name’s Viral,” he answered. His mouth twisted into a scowl. “Made sure we knew that before he burnt the place to the ground. When me and my sisters were hiding I saw him, like, kinda peek out of his gunmen’s mouth—and it’s fuckin’ crazy, too, his gunmen looked like it had two heads, sorta like Gurren Lagann—but, so, he looks out, he’s this wiry little pasty motherfucker, blond, these big sharp teeth. What a smug mother—mmh,” he clamped his teeth together and shook his head, turning away from Rossiu. “Let’s…C’mon.”

With one jerk, Kittan twirled Rossiu around to follow him around the perimeter of the lake. As they walked, Rossiu pursed his lips. If that was all Kittan would say about Viral, that was all Kittan would say about Viral. Maybe in a better place, at another time, he’d inquire further.

Skeletal hands, foot bones, skulls, all lined the walkway like décor. Every beastman Kittan had ever fought had received the brunt of every one of those old bones.

At the dead end of the half-open corridor, Kittan stopped, and Rossiu halted inches behind him. In the light of the torch, Rossiu watched Kittan looking up, gazing at the structures dangling from the ceiling.

Neither stalactite nor windchime, a multitude of odd tubes had been carved into the rocks hanging from the ceiling in the tiny chamber. At the back of the room, a large confluence of the tubes had been grafted into the rocks, and a scale of keys sat beneath them. “The Organ,” Kittan said. “Everybody learned how to play it sooner or later.”

After a moment watching it, as if waiting for movement, he dropped Rossiu’s hand and thrust the torch into it. He stepped toward the keys and, reaching out, pressed down on a possibly arbitrary one.

The room filled with a hollow, whistling hum, somewhere between the heavenly quality of a pipe organ and the light caress of a warm breeze on the surface at night. It had a feel to it, a texture. One note, and Rossiu could feel it against his skin. Kittan pressed another, and a note just a scale below it hummed throughout the room. He went back and forth between the two, then lifted his other hand. He began stumbling through some song, apparently, that Rossiu guessed he didn’t quite remember all the way, but pressed through anyway. He ended in the middle of a chord, hands dropping, head hanging, and he stood still while the echoes of the song evaporated into silence.

After sticking the torch into the ground, Rossiu had watched him the whole time, every movement of every finger that he could see from his angle. In Adai, there had been no music, not even a choir to chant the praises of the Face-God. The occasional tunneling inter-village visitor whistled a tune before they dropped off whatever they traded and left. Some sang to themselves. From miles and miles away, and perhaps he even dreamt it up right then and there, or years ago in his sleep and only now chose to conflate it with actual memories, Rossiu had a vague sense that, maybe, his mother may have hummed to him when he was very, very small, right on the cusp of the capacity for memory. He didn’t know. But he listened right then and there, and he felt rather top-heavy for a second. He had to breathe deep.

“That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, Kittan,” he said, voice emerging as the shaky offspring of a whisper and a gasp.

Kittan stood still, silent. His shoulders started to shake. And he wheeled around.

“Look at this shit!” Kittan cried, throwing his arms out to the sides. Rossiu jolted back. Kittan’s footing faltered a bit, as if he’d tried to lift his foot but couldn’t bring himself to do more than stir up a tiny puff of dirt. “There used to be shit here, Rossiu! Music and—people, and all sorts of—everything! All over the place! Now look at it! Just fuckin’ garbage everywhere! Bones! Everybody is dead! Mom and Dad and th—my—everyone’s dead! I just—look at it!”

Rossiu tried to look. His lips only tightened, as did his focus on Kittan, who bent over to pick up a hollow, squarish sort of fragment of an object. He spiked it back to the ground, and it shattered.

Kittan went on. “The fuck, man? Why here? I don’t get it! What did Bachika Village ever do that was so fuckin’—wrong? All we did was—y’know? Fucked around and made shit. Had fun. But no, he wasn’t gonna stand for that, was he? He picked out the least—the most—the goddamn—the most harmless village on the planet, Rossiu, and tore it the fuck apart like it—I don’t even know! Why us? Why any village? We were doing exactly what they wanted us to do! Wasn’t our fault there was a goddamn—rocks, a hole! We stayed underground!”

Hand balled into a shaking fist, Kittan reared back and sent a punch into the wall. It did nothing but echo. Rossiu darted over to him, but as was so often the case, didn’t have the body to make it in time. Kittan left his fist collided and frozen in time against the stone, and Rossiu wrapped his hands around his arm, just watching him.

Some guttural, low noise wound out from Kittan’s throat. He closed his eyes slowly and kept them closed for a long time. Rossiu waited until a tear pushed forth from the one eye he could see and rolled down to his jaw, heavy and round like it was the only one he’d ever be able to get out, before sliding his hands over to rest on top of Kittan’s. Blood seeped from his knuckles and stained his gloves. It congealed on Rossiu’s fingertips.

Kittan breathed in, once, slow and deep, and if he ever let the air out, Rossiu didn’t notice. His head fell back and he gazed up at the pipes hanging from the ceiling. Rossiu watched with him, speckles of cinders falling in the torchlight. He dropped his hands from the rock and to his sides, and Rossiu held on.

After a moment, Kittan sighed, and turned around. With his back to the rock, he slid down until he sat on the floor. Rossiu hesitated for a moment, but after watching Kittan wipe his face, leaving a tiny splotch of residual blood on his forehead, he dropped down beside him, hands on his knees.

He was quiet.

And then, staring out towards the light, he said, “Fuck. Why.”

Rossiu had already grabbed a hold of his hand again, and he slumped sideways. His head rested on Kittan’s shoulder.

What could he even think about? What could come out of his mouth now that would make any dent in anything? He felt Kittan shake a little, silent, holding back even the sound of his own breathing.

“Kittan,” he murmured. He opened his mouth and the rest followed free. “It will be fine. Just don’t ever forget about it. We have to keep going. We will make everything better.”

He heard Kittan mutter his name, trill the first syllable. He looked up just as Kittan moved his arm to wrap it around Rossiu’s body. Minutes ago or seconds ago, those massive tears had streamed from Kittan’s eyes to trace a watery path down his face. He wasn’t crying anymore, and Rossiu hadn’t even heard him when he had, but he was done, eyes red in the wake. Kittan stroked Rossiu’s side with his thumb.

“Ahh, don’t cry, Rossiu, what’re you doin’?”

He’d had no idea. His lips parted in shock, and he raced to wipe the tears from his eyes, but Kittan, vigilant as ever, beat him to it. They watched each other a moment, trying not to relapse, and Kittan relaxed back against the wall, pulling Rossiu with him. Side by side, they sat and watched the dust fall in the light of the fire.

“Sick of this bullshit,” Kittan mumbled.

Rossiu, hand resting on Kittan’s knee, nodded. He, too, remained quiet, just long enough to try to see if he could hear anything echoing from the corridors, or from the surface, far away, if it had anything to contribute.

Everything was silent. Bachika Village had had its tongue sliced from its mouth.

Rossiu turned, intending just to lay his other hand with the first on Kittan’s thigh. Kittan, though, snatched it up, and brought it softly down onto his knee. His thumb ran over his fingers, four fragile little things, pink with someone else’s blood, that didn’t belong with the likes of Kittan’s own, covered in gloves and a sticky sheet of blood and scars and nearly hacked off, it seemed, at some point. What had Rossiu done with his own before hijacking Agodego, or before lobbing balls of flammable water at whoever tried to kill them this time, or before pulling an accidental stick from a jar and revealing the mark at its tip? He’d prayed. He’d lit candles. He’d washed them in a dark, geothermal spring where everyone went to be alone. Nothing strenuous. He watched Kittan go over them, one by one, like he hadn’t ever seen them before.

He heard himself say, “I’m glad you brought me here. Thank you.”

A moment later, he glanced back over at Kittan. He was staring, eyes as alert and intent as the first time he’d ever brought Rossiu hunting with him. He hadn’t wiped those damp lines from his eyes.

Kittan dropped Rossiu’s hand and brought his own up to Rossiu’s jaw line. The two of them watched one another. Rossiu, fleetingly, couldn’t tell if they were still or moving, but it was so slow, all of it. He eased into the pull, a weak little magnet. He parted his lips and leaned forward, a mirror of Kittan doing the same.

In half the time he’d expected, he felt Kittan’s lips on his, pressing harder than he ever could have comprehended. Salty and a bit dry though they were, they were kissing him. Just sitting there letting it happen, Rossiu strained to kiss him back.

They were kissing.

Warm, he thought; it was very warm. He sat still for a while, just feeling it. Kittan’s teeth had brushed against his when their lips first met, and they sort of hung there until Kittan just barely broke away and angled his head the slightest bit, pushing in towards Rossiu, and they clinked together again. Rossiu pushed back. He brought his hand up and wiped the tear streak from Kittan’s face. When his fingers reached his jaw, he felt Kittan’s hand on his wrist, moving up until he wove their fingers together again.

As Kittan slid his hand up Rossiu’s back to finally let it rest in his hair, he toyed with Rossiu’s lips, pushing against them and then backing away but never totally stopping. Rossiu had no choice but to follow. They did the same things; Kittan showed Rossiu how to move, and he copied him. When Rossiu happened to open up just enough, he felt the tip of Kittan’s tongue tracing an exploratory line through the part, he tensed up for a second.

He’d never heard of this. Convinced it was some brand new thing Kittan had devised, his mouth stilted in opening to let him in, but he realized he’d never really heard of any of this. He hardly knew even the most innocent, parental kisses. They’d left his memory years ago, if he’d ever truly felt them. The tame ones at weddings were nothing like this, either. He knew when he tried to mimic Kittan, letting his own tongue shimmy in a millimeter at a time, that he’d never known this sort of thing to even exist. This wasn’t…

…No. No, even Rossiu knew they’d have to have taken their clothing off for that. What a silly idea. They were only kissing.

Yet somehow, that didn’t quite do it justice. Rossiu had crawled to his knees, lips still locked with Kittan, just to reach him better. Inside, Kittan tried to pull Rossiu’s shy tongue into his mouth, both of them sliding against one another. He thought it felt strange, but even so, it had to be the strangest kind of strange he could imagine. The teasing and the slipping and the rubbing all sent Rossiu’s back shivering, and as Kittan moved one hand down to his hip and the other to his shoulder, then his thigh and his neck, then both to his shoulder blades to pull him into his lap, Rossiu went limp against him and fell into place, like he belonged there.

With Rossiu panting and noodly in his lap, Kittan finally broke away from him, letting his grip fall onto either side of Rossiu’s waist. They watched the flush in one another’s faces drain and return with each breath. Kittan leaned forward and rested his forehead against Rossiu’s stomach. Rossiu moved his hands from Kittan’s shoulders to the back of his head, stroking them through the closely-shorn, abrasive, dark plane and the blond shock that had once reminded him so much of his own, way back when. Kittan held onto him like he’d fall off and float away, dead weight in the sweeping atmosphere.

“Do you want to sleep in here tonight?” Rossiu asked. When he spoke, he felt the burn still on his lips, the phantom pressure, the tingling. He wondered what the cure might be and how he might turn it down.

Kittan nodded. Holding gently onto Rossiu, he leaned forward and placed Rossiu down on the ground, on his back, and rested with his head in the same place, on his stomach. Rossiu only debated whether he should do it after he’d already spread his legs to make room for Kittan’s shoulders, letting them rest on top of them, barely bent.

“Rossiu,” Kittan muttered around the muffling cloth of Rossiu’s shirt.

“Yes?”

He didn’t say anything more. He held him tightly, and Rossiu held him back.


End file.
